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GOP response to the Texas winter storms steals directly from Trump’s sadistic COVID-19 playbook

Donald Trump may be gone, having left behind a pandemic that has killed nearly 500,000 Americans, due to his malicious incompetence. Still, his spirit lives on in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus, Fox News. It’s the spirit of governing the people like you hate them and want them to die. Just take a look at the GOP response to the crisis in Texas, which has been buried under blizzards so bad that “unseasonable” is a comical understatement. The ice and snow has caused the power grid in the state to collapse, leaving millions of Texans without power and heat in deadly conditions. Rather than deal with the problems with maturity and grace, however, Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his allies are taking a page directly from Trump’s coronavirus response playbook by abandoning people while exploiting the situation to push a far-right, authoritarian agenda that will only make the problems much worse. 

Just as Trump’s response to the pandemic suggested he was rooting for the coronavirus, Abbott and company are using this natural disaster to fight for a future with more natural disasters. 

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott sneered on Fox News Tuesday night, blaming “[o]ur wind and our solar” and insisting that it “just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” This is, of course, the opposite of true.

While scientists always hesitate to blame any single bad weather event on climate change, the reality is that its effects are felt in these kinds of extreme weather conditions experienced by Texas and much of the South right now. “But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure,” Brad Plumer writes in the New York Times, adding, “unless grid planners start planning for increasingly wild and unpredictable climate conditions, grid failures will happen again and again.”

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“The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.-N.Y., tweeted in response to Abbott, noting that a huge part of the plan is updating the electrical grid so it doesn’t have these problems. 

But Abbott doesn’t want to admit that climate change is real, even as his state gets buried under weather that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Worse, in a very Trumpian style, Abbott’s instinct in the face of catastrophe is to do whatever it takes to make things worse. In this case, that means doubling down on the very fossil fuels that are driving the problem of climate change. 

And why not? Modern conservatism long ago abandoned any idea of good governance or a coherent ideology. Instead, the guiding principle is trolling liberals. As Trump discovered during the pandemic, when he convinced his followers to reject masks and social distancing, very few things trigger the liberals as reliably as deliberately causing mass death from wholly preventable causes. And as Adam Serwer, staff writer for the Atlantic and Texas resident, said on Twitter: “What’s going on in Texas is what happens in a one party state where every single statewide politician has no professional skills beyond stoking culture war bullshit every day so they didn’t winterize its generation sources the last time this happened.” 

Not only is Abbott’s trolling response to this crisis only going to make the problem worse, but it’s also flat-out lying.

As the Electric Reliability Council of Texas pointed out, frozen turbines were the smallest contributor to the Texas blackout problem. Instead, the problems are largely due to Republican governance and the conservative philosophy of letting government services rot instead of keeping them updated and working. Indeed, it’s the natural gas system — one of the fuels Abbott was hyping with his troll-the-liberals approach — that has been the primary source of the blackout problem in Texas. 

It’s not a surprise Abbott is going about this in the most destructive way possible. Like his role model Trump, Abbott is taking all his cues from Fox News. 

“Fox News’ answer is to blame the state’s reliance on wind energy,” report Allison Fisher and Evlondo Cooper of Media Matters, pointing at multiple segments in which the network is exploiting the disaster “to feed fears about clean energy and the Green New Deal that it has long nurtured.” 

Part of what is feeding this is no doubt money from fossil fuel industries, who handsomely fund the campaigns of Abbott and other Texas Republicans. But Fox News and their right-wing audience that eats this crap up are not really driven as much by oil and gas money. Ultimately, that flavor of anti-environmentalism is pure tribalistic hatred. Reflexively hating anything liberals like is what defines modern conservatism. After all, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick turned to Fox News to publicly suggest America’s elderly sacrifice themselves to save American capitalism in the face of coronavirus shutdowns. So Republicans will let people in their own communities freeze to death rather than admit liberals might be right about this climate change thing. 

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The sadism undergirding modern conservatism was illuminated by Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, who — in perfect troll style — kicked off a Facebook rant on Tuesday by declaring, “Let me hurt some feelings while I have a minute!!” 

Boyd then went on to declare that “City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” and people who wanted the power turned back on were “lazy” and “looking for a damn hand out!” He recommended that people who want electricity and water stop looking to utility companies and instead “step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe” and that people are “capable of doing it themselves!”

He never bothered to explain how ordinary people should generate electricity and water for themselves, of course, but insisted on the justice of his approach by declaring, “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish[sic].”

Boyd ended up resigning after the public outcry, but really, his rant is merely a blunter version of the general GOP ethos that has, in recent months, morphed into an outright death cult. It’s the same mentality fueling those who refuse to wear masks or socially distance, believing that any kind of concern or care for others is weak liberal thinking. That’s how ridiculous the American right has become, that they will invite objectively terrible outcomes into their own lives just to own the liberals. You might even say they’re freezing off their noses to spite their faces. 

AOC takes on Biden after president rejects proposal to cancel $50,000 in student debt

President Joe Biden broke with Democrats who are pushing for a sweeping executive order to forgive $50,000 in federal student loan debt, saying he will only support a plan to erase one-fifth of that amount for individual borrowers.

Biden was asked at a CNN town hall on Tuesday whether he would support a plan proposed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to forgive up to $50,000 in student debt after the president proposed a more limited $10,000 cancellation plan.

Biden said he “would not” eliminate $50,000 in student debt, arguing that need depends on whether someone went to public universities or private universities like “Harvard and Yale and Penn.” That money could instead be used to boost funding for early childhood education, he said. Instead, Biden proposed, community college tuition should be free for everyone, and state university tuition should be free for families making under $125,000.

Those latter proposals are widely embraced by Democrats. But Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a progressive leader in Congress, questioned the logic behind Biden’s rejection of the Schumer-Warren plan.

“Why cares what school someone went to?” she asked on Twitter. “Entire generations of working class kids were encouraged to go into more debt under the guise of elitism. This is wrong.”

Ocasio-Cortez also rejected Biden’s argument that “we must trade-off early childhood education for student loan forgiveness.”

“We can have both,” she said. “The case against student loan forgiveness is looking shakier by the day. We’ve got the *Senate Majority Leader* on board to forgive $50k. Biden’s holding back, but many of the arguments against it just don’t hold water on close inspection. We can and should do it.”

Biden later reiterated that he supports eliminating $10,000 in debt, but not $50,000.

“I’m prepared to write off $10,000 debt, but not 50 [thousand],” he said, “because I don’t think I have the authority to do it” through signing an executive order.

A White House spokesperson later clarified to Slate that Biden supports legislation to eliminate $10,000 in debt and was not promising to use executive authority to do so.

Schumer and Warren have argued for months, however, that Biden does have the authority to unilaterally eliminate $50,000 in student debt via executive order.

“This is one of those things the president can do on his own,” Schumer told reporters earlier this month. “President Biden has taken some good steps in the direction of student debt but we think he has to go much further.”

Experts at Harvard’s Legal Services Center and its Project on Predatory Student Lending also concluded last year that the president has the authority to order a sweeping cancellation of student debt.

Earlier this month, Schumer and Warren, along with dozens of other Democratic members of Congress, introduced a resolution calling for Biden to use his authority under the Higher Education Act, which gives the education secretary the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption.” The Trump administration used the law last year to suspend interest on federally-held student debt.

The resolution also called on Biden to use the Internal Revenue Code to prevent any tax liability for borrowers resulting from the cancellation.

“During a time of historic and overlapping crises, which are disproportionately impacting communities of color, we must do everything in our power to deliver real relief to the American people, lift up our struggling economy and close the racial wealth gap,” Schumer said in a statement at the time. “Democrats are committed to big, bold action, and this resolution to cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt is one of the strongest steps the president can take to achieve these goals.”

Warren added that even before the pandemic the “student loan debt crisis was already crushing millions of Americans.”

“By cancelling up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers, President Biden can take the single most effective executive action available to provide a massive stimulus to our economy, help narrow the racial wealth gap, and lift this impossible burden off of tens of millions of families,” she said.

The Democrats’ plan would fully eliminate student debt for about 36 million borrowers, according to CNBC, and reduce the total national student debt from $1.7 trillion to $700 billion.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., has argued that the plan is a matter of “racial and economic justice.” An analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2019 found that Black students are more likely to take out loans for college and that Black borrowers tend to have higher student debt loads. A poll this week found that 67% of Black voters strongly support eliminating student debt.

Some economists have argued that canceling $50,000 in student debt would disproportionately benefit top earners who went to expensive elite schools. Others say, however, that the higher figure is more inclusive of students who have racked up larger debts — most outstanding student loans are between $20,000 and $25,000 — and would reduce the racial wealth gap and boost the economy.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, a Republican Trump appointee, agreed with Warren during a hearing last year that the student debt crisis could hinder the economy as it tries to recover from the pandemic.

“People … are weighed down by debt in a situation like this, where they may be unemployed, or unemployment is very high among, for example, low-wage workers,” he said. “That can weigh on economic activity.”

Powell later cited data showing that “people … take on student debt in an effort to make their lives better and brighter, and if it doesn’t work out that way, they drag that debt down through their economic lives, and it can get in the way of their credit history, of course, and their ability to own a home, and their whole economic life for many years.”

A chocolate sandwich tastes exactly as comforting as it sounds — and it’s sublime

Why aren’t we putting chocolate on bread all the time? That’s the question I keep returning to as of late.

It’s a dream that took hold when I went to Paris as a teen. At the time, I was staying with a French family who dazzled me with their sophistication. They drank wine with lunch, and for breakfast, they slathered Nutella on baguettes. I was blown away. They had a jar! Of chocolate! On their kitchen table! Suddenly, the Count Chocula I’d previously considered the apex of morning luxury seemed hopelessly pedestrian.

A few years later, I went to visit a friend in Rome. On my first morning in the Eternal City, I watched, agog, as her roommate casually grated a block of dark chocolate over a piece of buttered toast. As far as I was concerned, this woman might as well have been doing close up magic. What was this sorcery?

RELATED: The viral feta pasta dish everyone’s raving about is even better without pasta

I’ll always be a person who makes cookies and cakes and brownies. But when that pure desire for chocolate and carbs hits, why make things complicated? Why preheat an oven? Why bust out a stand mixer? Instead, why not just be Continental and rustle up a chocolate sandwich? Moreover, why not make the best chocolate sandwich in the world?

I first discovered pastry chef and City Bakery founder Maruy Rubin’s version of the dish several years ago through a New York Times recipe. In truth, it wasn’t so much of a recipe as a suggestion — grilled cheese, but make it chocolate! 

The end result is timeless, but when I spoke to Rubin recently, I noted that this comfort food seemed particularly suited to the moment. Rubin, whose current project is The Wonderbon Chocolate Co., concurred.

“It’s a pitch-perfect pandemic food,” he said. “It’s super simple and approachable. That is not like making a chocolate tart infused with Ethiopian coffee beans. It’s fun. It’s delicious. It’s family-friendly.”

What’s your go-to easiest recipe? Tell us below in the comments!

The grilled chocolate sandwich is the best sort of food — the kind that works at any time of day. It makes a luscious breakfast and a loose, chocolate fondue-ish dessert. I’ve made it for lunch, because I’m a grown woman who can eat chocolate for lunch like a European — and it’s sublime. If you want a light bite, you can slice it in half to share, but don’t expect that kind of generosity from me.

“When I was learning to bake, the difficulty factor of recipes looked like climbing a big mountain,” Rubin said. “Once I learned to bake, I thought, ‘Why does that recipe seem so daunting when it’s really not?’ I’ve always thought there was a sort of tyranny of recipe writers, who in some quiet room someplace far away decided to make things just a little more complicated or intimidating than they need to be.”

This, on the other hand, “should be complete freedom,” he continued. “This should be one, two, three, throw it together. Look at that — done, ready to go, let’s eat. That’s it — and it smells great.”

But how do you know you’ve made it the right way? As it turns out, the answer’s easy.

“The very specific comment this should elicit is, ‘Oh my God, why have I never had one of these before?'” Rubin said.

* * *

Recipe: Grilled Chocolate Sandwich

Adapted from Maury Rubin

Serves 1 (Or 2 if you’re magnanimous)

Ingredients:

  • 2 slices of your favorite bread (I prefer brioche or challah.)
  • 1 hunk of your favorite thin chocolate bar, cut the same size as the bread (That’s about 6 squares of a Lindt bar, if you’re so inclined.)
  • 4ish tablespoons of butter, softened

Instructions:

  1. Heat a skillet or cast iron pan over a medium-high flame.
  2. While the skillet heats, sandwich the chocolate in between the two slices of bread.
  3. Generously butter the top of the sandwich. Next, put it in the hot pan, buttered side down.
  4. While the bottom toasts, butter the other side of the bread.
  5. Flip the sandwich over after about 1 minute. The bread should be golden, and the chocolate should be just starting to melt.
  6. Toast another 30 seconds or so, to just brown.
  7. Remove from the pan, slice and eat immediately.

More Quick & Dirty: Have you read the debut column? 

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Texas Republicans mocked California for blackouts. Now their tweets are coming back to haunt them

After a blizzard shut down Texas’s energy grid last weekend, leaving millions without power, Republican lawmakers from Texas are now being raked through the mud on Twitter for having jumped on the opportunity to mock a similar crisis in California last year.  

California faced some of the biggest rolling blackouts in the state’s history due to a record-breaking heat wave in 2020, with over 2 million residents affected by the outage. The crisis served as an inconvenient reminder to both state and federal officials that weatherization will become an increasingly important part of coping with the extreme weather changes brought on by climate change. Instead of expressing compassion for the state’s residents, who were enduring wildfires, outages, and the COVID crisis all at the same time, many Republican lawmakers from Texas seized upon California’s time of need to criticize Democratic leadership and the potential of green energy. 

“California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, tweeted last year, “Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”

Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-TX, echoed Cruz, specifically taking aim at the “corrupt ‘green'” policies that have “left Texas energy workers out of a job” without citing any evidence that this has been the case. In fact, there is reason to believe that green energy has created jobs in Texas. 

“California’s energy nightmare shows us why Texas must trust the free market,” Senator John Cornyn, R-TX, stated.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-TX, also joined the chorus last year, tweeting, “Alexa, show me what happens when you let Democrats control energy policy,” but then attempted to defend his behavior.  

California Governor Gavin Newsom cited climate change (a phenomenon accelerated by gas and coal power plants) as one of the main contributors to last year’s blackout, but Texas Republicans nevertheless made non-renewable energy the culprit of California’s blackouts, despite there being no evidence for this. 

Republican lawmakers from Texas, who have a long history of touting their state’s energy prowess, are finding themselves the butt of the joke as millions in the Lone Star State are facing days-long blackouts.

Although many right-wing lawmakers and pundits are loudly blaming frozen wind turbines for the historic blackout Texas is facing, coal and nuclear energy were reportedly responsible for about twice as many outages as renewables, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which operates the state’s power grid. Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program Jacobson, told the Associated Press, “It’s really natural gas and coal and nuclear that are providing the bulk of the electricity and that’s the bulk of the cause of the blackouts.”

Toss your favorite pasta in Martha Stewart’s baked feta dip for an easy, comforting weeknight dinner

The casual and carefree nature of an appetizer is what we crave when preparing the main course at the end of another busy weeknight. If only dinner entailed breaking out a chic chopping block every night and assembling a charcuterie board, fruit plate or hummus trio drizzled olive oil. Because unless you want to spend your evenings picking at cheese and grapes — which doesn’t sound too bad, honestly— the easy dinner of your dreams may seem out of reach.

Or so we thought until Martha Stewart’s baked feta-marinade dip resurfaced this week on Instagram — and thank goddess she pulled this 2018 recipe from her archives! Not only is it a fantastic alternative to the recent viral feta pasta craze — here, the addition of piquillo peppers offers a sweet twist — it’s the ultimate example of the perfect no-fuss dinner we’ve so desperately been craving. 

If you want to cut corners, you can simply dress up a jar of marinara and serve it with store-bought crostini. Whereas, if you want to channel your Martha, you can go the extra mile and whip up a homemade marinara with only five ingredients.

Assembling this appetizer is a breeze. First, blend the sauce with the peppers. Then, pour the mixture into a heatproof dish. Finally, top it with feta, and bake until everything is nice and bubbly. Serve your finished dip with a batch of this crisp (but not too crisp!) crostini.

To transform your delicious creation from appetizer into a simple weeknight dinner, all you need to do is add one step to the original three-step recipe. And it couldn’t be any less complicated: Toss your favorite type of pasta into the dish.

Too good to be true? You won’t know until you try it for yourself. But once you do, this baked feta-marinade is guaranteed to be a staple in your home. Full recipe here.

For more of our favorite recipes from Martha, check out: 

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My mom has always foraged. A year into the pandemic, I understand why

“Did you eat your ginkgo nuts today?” My mom’s anxious, familiar refrain turned in my head even after we spoke. The next morning, I investigated my crowded freezer, where she stashes said ginkgo nuts. The bag was still full.

The first thing my omma does upon arriving at my home (we don’t live together, but are in a “pod”) is open my fridge and freezer. Like a discerning chef, she wants to know which of the ingredients and home-cooked dishes she brought over last time I actually ate, and which I didn’t. Today, she’s disappointed. She puts the bag back in the freezer and peers up at me accusingly. “You didn’t eat any ginkgos,” she says, her voice heavy with the kind of disappointment that non-Korean parents likely reserve for kids who’ve hosted a kegger while they were out of town. “Ginkgo nuts make your blood circulate and memory sharp,” she reminds me.

I shrug and admit that I missed out on my chance for better circulation and memory enhancement the day before (and the day before that), now feeling somewhat guilty. My mom forages for ginkgos in a glade near her Southern California house, handpicking each fruit. With an impromptu forager’s pouch slung cross-body, she sniffs out her old haunts every week — she’s visited these ginkgo trees for almost a decade. She brings home her stock, cracks each pungent golden fruit to reveal the magical, memory-improving nut within, and rinses, shells, roasts, and freezes each one. Then, nuts packed in a little cooler, she brings them to me.

Omma has carefully taught me recipes for employing ginkgo nuts: in her jook, the rice porridge is lovely studded with nutty roasted ginkgo; her samgyetang is a soup of poached whole Cornish hen stuffed with rice, ginseng, and, of course, ginkgo nuts. Despite loving the taste of the nuts, I’ve formed a strange oppositional relationship with them — and with my mom. The more she pushes the ginkgos and their recipes on me, the more I push them — and her — away.

As the pandemic became more frightening, my mom only increased the extent of her foraging, gathering edibles like a frenetic squirrel preparing for winter. She’s also gardening even more, because winter in SoCal is the time to harvest spinach, lettuce, and peas, among many others. Part of it is about staying busy (“busy” is her favorite word, after “free”). But also, exhausted with the worry of operating her restaurant, she closed it a couple years ago, so she’s without an income at a troubling time; I was laid off during the pandemic, and can’t help her financially as I’d like to. Foraging is now both a health strategy and a survival tactic for her.

Though I’ve written articles about foragers, was a member of the New York Mycological Society, and have taken many formal foraging tours, when I see my mom picking up something from the ground and tucking it into her bag, I find myself embarrassed. It’s odd to me — I’m so proud of my mom as a cook, and yet something about seeing her forage for acorns in our wealthy suburb of Los Angeles makes me feel apprehensive.

I’d characterize my hesitance as an effort to preserve “middle-class respectability.” Though we rent, my husband and I hustled hard to build this life for ourselves and our son — the ethos of which is built around organic kale from Whole Foods, not foraged dandelion greens. When we play in the park with my son, my mom pauses to pick up a few plantain leaves or some sage. Unconsciously, I find myself walking away from her, hoping my Madewell purse, Warby Parker glasses, and minimalist gold jewelry telegraph my status, mymiddle-class respectability, to the other women around.

Omma doesn’t care about respectability, though, only survival. I think a lot of other people can relate, especially right now. Struggling to put food — any food — on the table, every day, is the reality for so many sufferers of this pandemic-induced recession, who are using techniques like triple-couponing, bartering, and foraging to supplement government stimulus and unemployment checks.

From my mom’s perspective, there’s no shame in survival — and thus, absolutely no shame in foraging. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of my discomfort: Why does it bother me when I see her forage for something that I would drop in my cart if I saw it neatly packaged at the grocery store, emblazoned with “local” and “organic” labels? Why do I accept foraging with her when we’re in Korea, or when no one is watching, but find repulsion in it in an affluent American neighborhood?

My only answer thus far goes deep, psychologically speaking, venturing into the emotional entanglement of identity and race that hurts to unpack. It’s rooted in layered socioeconomic implications: growing up poor in rural central Illinois, as an Asian-American whose mother foraged long before foraging tours were available to the public or celebrity chefs on TV extolled the virtues of (and charged hundreds of dollars for) a hand-foraged meal. I’ve subconsciously internalized a neocolonialist view that American items are superior to Korean ones. Even though I write about Korean and Korean-American foodways, some parts of me still think a plate of shrimp and grits with a bottle of wine is superior to a comforting bowl of jook with ginkgo nuts and a makgeolli.

Indeed, shrimp used to be a poor man’s food, and food respectability fluctuates with sociocultural perspective; still, my mother’s foraging triggers an inferiority complex built up over my lifetime. These insecurities were fed by absorbing decades of pop culture and advertising that privileges rich over poor, white folks over folks of color. By bullying at school over my kimbap for lunch. By a capitalist society that teaches that food is to be bought, not foraged.

Looking through the lens of the pandemic, as we collectively find ourselves approaching a year of life changed, I’ve found my views on my mother’s foraging starting to shift. I’m beginning to truly celebrate locavorism: Now, most of my produce comes from my mom’s garden or her foraging. Every week, I find wondrous garden-picked savoy cabbage and foraged purslane in my crisper, fresh from my mom’s tote. I’ve even joined her for some recent expeditions, and discovered some gems of my own.

In this time of crisis, I’m deeply impressed by her resourcefulness, her tenacity, and her will to not just feed her family, but to feed us the best meals, rich with life-extending nutrients. Unimpressed with store-bought dandelion green teas, she foraged her own, drying the root, stem, and flowers into a base for slow-cooker tea. Unwilling to pay top dollar for store-bought kale chips, she foraged plantain leaves and made her own crispy snacks. Unable to buy enough persimmons to dry for the cinnamon-scented punch sujeonggwa, she bartered with my neighbors: tree-trimming services for all the persimmons she could carry home.

My mom has the gumption to do what she does, regardless of the thoughts of others. Her inherited knowledge pays more heed to ancestral traditions than modern trends. Foraging will never be a fad for my mom — in fact, when I once excitedly told her I’d gone foraging to promote locavorism with a bunch of Slow Food USA folks and explained its growing popularity, she had a quick retort: “Girl, I’ve been doing that since before you were born. I’m the original slow food!”

Winter here is a ripe time for foraging fresh ingredients for dotori-muk-muchim (acorn jelly salad), dandelion salad, and roasted ginkgo nuts. Come April, the yucca will bloom, their white creamy blossoms dotting the mountain slopes, and the wild radish greens will sprout on the mountain flanking our favorite hiking trail. The pandemic will still rage, and I may still be unemployed. And my resourceful, intelligent mother, who implements the knowledge of our ancestors, will be out on the mountain slopes, her shovel and tote bag in her hands. But this time, I’ll be with her.

Related recipes:

Barbecue begone: The very best tricks to get that smoke smell out of everything

Now that all of our social activities tend to happen outdoors — and now that the outdoors is not nearly as hospitable a place as it was a few months ago — it’s likely that backyard fire pits are all the rage again. Maybe your extended family is huddling around for s’mores, distanced six feet apart, calling for quite a substantial fire to warm the divide. It could be that you’re just grilling on the deck, shuffling back and forth into the house with steaks for a Friday dinner. Or perhaps you’re a serious outdoors-person and you’re braving the winter elements — in which case, a crackling fire is most definitely necessary.

The origins notwithstanding, smoke smell is one of the most notoriously clingy scents, latching onto clothes, hair, blankets, furniture, and anything that comes within a 10-foot radius of it. It can be tough to banish, too, often lingering well past the last s’more is scarfed down and steak digested. To remedy that, here are some tips (straight from the experts) that will be sure to get even the most stubborn smoke odor out of winter sweaters and summer patio furniture alike.

* * *

How to remove smoke odor from clothes

After a camping trip or bonfire, your clothes might have the unpleasant lingering odor of smoke. The following are a few ways to send that smell packing and leave your outfits smelling as good as new.

The sunshine strategy

The first deodorizing method you may want to try is to simply leave the garments out in the sun. It’s the longest-lead of all the below methods, but it also requires little to no effort. If you have a clothesline, simply hang your clothes out on a nice day — the combo of the sun’s ultraviolet rays and fresh air can work wonders on light odors.

No clothesline? No problem. Just drape clothes over a chair in a sunny spot. How long to leave them out depends on how much odor trapped itself in the fabric, but doing a sniff check every 24 hours or so to check their progress. This method shouldn’t take more than two to three days.

Bring in the baking soda

Among all its manifold benefits (tub-scrubber extraordinaire, stainless steel warrior, fridge-deodorizer), baking soda is also known to be a potent deodorizer, and it can help remove the smell of smoke from clothes.

There are two strategies you can try: First, place your clothes in a plastic garbage bag with 1/2 cup of baking soda — you might want to bump it up to 1 cup if you have more than a few garments. Tie the bag shut, shake it up, and let it sit overnight. Laundry Care recommends tumbling the clothes on low or no heat for an extra odor-fighting boost.

The other option is to simply wash stinky clothes with baking soda. Groomed Home explains you can put a few tablespoons of baking soda into your washing machine’s fabric softener tray to remove odors from laundry. However, this method shouldn’t be used on wool or silk.

The mouthwash method

In our research, another tip that kept surfacing uses an unconventional ingredient to remove smoke odors. Apparently, mixing two cups of Scope mouthwash into each load of laundry will effectively remove smoke smells.

It sounds weird, but one commenter on ThriftyFun says this tip was actually recommended by the Red Cross after a house fire and worked wonders for them!

OK, but what about the smoky items that aren’t so easy to launder? We’d recommend starting with the sunshine or baking soda strategies outlined above, but if that doesn’t work, here are a few more ways to get the stink out of things like cushions, tents, and other fabrics.

The vinegar wipe down

Ah, vinegar. Quite like baking soda, it’s a natural cleaning powerhouse, adept at revealing streak-free glass, and when combined with baking soda, bubbles off grime and crud wherever it lands. Of course, it’s also another natural odor remover. You can clean camping equipment and cut through the smell of smoke by mixing one part white vinegar with one part warm water. Do a spot test on the fabric to ensure the vinegar doesn’t cause discoloration, then use the mixture to wipe down tents and other smelly equipment.

Get help from coffee grounds

Coffee grounds are surprisingly effective at absorbing unwanted odors — my family always used them to treat carpets when our pets had accidents — and they’re especially helpful for deodorizing smelly tents!

Simply set your tent up in the yard on a nice day, then put a few generous bowls of coffee grounds inside. If you have sleeping bags, cushions, or fabric chairs that smell, put those inside the tent too! Let everything sit for a few days, and the ground coffee will help remove those gross odors.

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How to remove smoke stink from furniture

Sure, it’s nice to have a chair sidled up to the grill to pause flipping and pop a squat, but at what cost? If your patio furniture tends to hold onto the faint smell of smoke from being too close to the grill, they might need a cleaning. While most metal or hard wood furniture won’t get too smelly, fabric or soft wood items may develop odors over time.

You can try the odor-removal methods recommended above on your furniture, or take one of the following strategies for a spin.

Pour out some vodka

Cheers! Refinishing Furniture explains that wiping down furniture with vodka can help get odors out. Just pour a little onto a washcloth, then wipe it over the affected area. Alternatively, you can put the alcohol into a spray bottle and spritz it over your furniture.

Refinish your furniture

If you’ve been itching to give your patio a little makeover, now’s your chance! For wooden furniture, a quick sanding and a new coat of paint or finish will seal any odors in — plus, it will give your outdoor area an instant facelift.

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How to get the smoke smell out of your hair

Your hair can definitely get a little smelly if you’re hanging out by the grill or a bonfire for too long, which is why dry shampoo is a must on any outdoor excursion. Most dry shampoos have an odor-fighting aspect that’s perfect for weekend getaways — or the day after a cookout when you don’t want to wash your hair.

Alternatively, Loxa Beauty recommends running a dryer sheet over your hair to eliminate odors and tame flyaways — two birds with one sheet!

Lindsey Graham: GOP doesn’t have “snowball’s chance in hell” of taking back Senate without Trump

Sen. Lindsey Graham questioned GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s political acumen while continuing to publicly show fealty to Donald Trump during a Tuesday night interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Graham said, “what I would say to Sen. McConnell, ‘I know Trump can be a handful, but he is the most dominant figure in the Republican Party. We don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump.'”

He then questioned McConnell’s political instincts.

“If you don’t get that, you’re just not looking,” Graham argued. “He was a hell of a president on all of the things that conservatives really believe in. It was a consequential presidency.”

“I’m sorry what happened on Jan. 6,” Graham said even though he voted against convicting Trump for inciting the insurrection. “He’ll get his fair share of blame, but to my Republican colleagues in the Senate, let’s try to work together — realize that without President Trump, we’re never going to get back in the majority.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

Sean Hannity’s private plane and the Wake Forest tennis team: A morality fable

During a broadcast about two weeks ago, Fox News personality Sean Hannity seized on a favorite trope, saying that former Secretary of State John Kerry, recently appointed to a post as climate envoy by President Biden, “frequently enjoys the comfort, the convenience of his very own private jet” while advocating for policies to combat climate change. Publicly available records, however, raise abundant questions about Hannity’s own use of his private jet in support of his son’s tennis career at Wake Forest University, and his relationship with the team’s star coach, Tony Bresky.

According to NCAA and sports law experts, the timeline of those events exhibits an unusual and at times suspicious level of engagement between Hannity and Bresky, including but not limited to the school’s frequent use of Hannity’s plane. Facts of that relationship also appear to have triggered a previously unreported federal grand jury investigation — which has been closed without indictments, to be clear — into events surrounding the recruitment of Hannity’s son, specifically the striking fact that Bresky purchased a luxury home next door to one bought by Hannity, according to documents obtained by Salon and a person familiar with the case.

Hannity, through his lawyer, Charles Harder, and Bresky, through Wake Forest, both denied ever being aware of any such federal investigation.

More broadly, the story exposes uncomfortable truths about the quiet leverage of wealth, power and race in collegiate athletics, particularly in low-revenue sports such as tennis that don’t have as many eyes on them, or marquee athletes. As the “Varsity Blues” college admissions bribery scandal demonstrated, those programs have been particularly ripe for exploitation, some of which, in those cases, veered into criminality. The Hannity example does not appear to rise to that level — no specific crimes have been alleged, and the grand jury investigation has been closed — it shines a light into one of the NCAA’s many legal gray zones, where law and ethics may not always go hand in glove.

The facts of the case

Patrick Hannity, Sean Hannity’s son, is currently a redshirt senior on the tennis team at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He signed with the school in November 2016, and officially enrolled and joined the team in January 2017. 

In January 2016, about nine months before Patrick officially applied to Wake Forest, his father, through a shell company, became the registered owner of a 2004 Gulfstream G200 jet, with the tail number N329PK. By Feb. 10, according to photograph metadata, Hannity had detailed the plane in black and gold — the colors of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. In more recent photos, the jet sports the Wake Forest logo on its tail.

Then, on June 23, 2016, before Patrick Hannity applied to Wake Forest and five months before he signed, his father’s shell company SPMK XXII NC (created about two weeks earlier) purchased a house for $813,000 on Turnberry Forest Court in Winston-Salem. Three months later, in September, the Wake Forest men’s tennis head coach, Tony Bresky, contracted to buy the house next door for $820,000, according to public property records. Bresky and his wife closed their deal about a month after Patrick Hannity signed with Wake Forest.

“That’s odd right off the bat,” Ricky Volante, a sports and entertainment lawyer, told Salon. “It’s suspicious, but it’s hard to nail down what it means. It’s far outside the norm for a parent to be purchasing property in the area, with the coach moving in next door before his son sent in his application.”

According to Wake Forest, Patrick applied to Wake Forest at some point in the fall of 2016, and was accepted in October. In a tennis-themed Fox Business appearance on Aug. 29 of that year, in which Sean Hannity competed in a serving contest with a few of his on-air colleagues, he said that his son was “going to Wake Forest. He’s so happy.”

One of Patrick Hannity’s coaches at Wake Forest moved into Hannity’s new home in Winston-Salem almost immediately, and lived there with Patrick for some time. At some point in 2016, Cory Parr, who had earlier coached Patrick as a junior player on Long Island (where the Hannity family primarily resides), began listing his residence at the Turnberry Forest Court address, according to North Carolina voter and business records. Weeks after Patrick enrolled, the university announced that Parr, himself a Wake tennis graduate and former all-American, would come aboard as a volunteer assistant coach.

In legal terms, it is difficult to assess the interactions between Wake Forest, Bresky and the Hannitys. First, the rules governing NCAA recruitment are known for elasticity, and key points along the timeline of Patrick’s journey to a redshirt, midyear addition to the tennis team are unclear. Both Wake Forest and the Hannity family, through attorney Harder, insist that nothing untoward occurred. But NCAA regulations experts have told Salon that this particular chain of events appears unusual, and that the school may have violated the rules governing early contact with a recruit. (Those rules, to be fair, are often ignored.) Compliance experts both inside and outside college athletic programs describe the timeline as “weird” and “suspicious,” and say that even setting aside questions of legality, the ethics are not flattering.

“NCAA rules are not airtight. There are back doors,” a legal expert in NCAA regulations told Salon, on the condition of anonymity. “It’s sometimes difficult to see the differences between unlawful transactions and a wealthy helicopter parent doing all they can for their kid.”

The lawyer added: “What I don’t get is why. Why go to these lengths if the kid is qualified? Why this level of personal involvement? There may be an explanation, but it’s just bizarre.”

Volante noted that in addition to showing favoritism to schools and sports based on revenue, NCAA enforcement decisions sometimes display racial bias.

“If these benefits were flowing to Black athletes, or to a predominantly Black sport, the NCAA would be there within a flash,” Volante said. “A predominantly white sport, a low-profile sport like tennis, often won’t get the same scrutiny.”

One NCAA compliance official at an Atlantic Coast Conference school — that is, a school in Wake Forest’s conference — told Salon it was “not possible” that a random player with Patrick Hannity’s relatively modest statistics could land a spot on a top-tier team without the backing of family money or influence. Many schools will happily pay tens of thousands of dollars to keep an athlete on the bench for four years “if it’s worth that million-dollar donation” coming at some point down the road, the official said.

Asked whether he knew of other parents and coaches who had engaged in living arrangements similar to those of the Hannitys, Parr and Bresky, the official said: “No, I’ve never heard of that.”

Wake Forest requires students to live in campus housing for three years, unless they live with a parent or guardian in the area. Harder, the family attorney, would not say whether Patrick Hannity, now a senior, has met that requirement, and would not say whether Patrick has lived in the Winston-Salem house with a parent, or whether Cory Parr was acting as his guardian.

Parr still lives at that address today, according to North Carolina voter records, and used it to register a company called Charity Raffles LLC in November 2016, a few weeks before Patrick signed with Wake. That company is the parent of another Parr entity called Give2Gain, which holds raffles and auctions for sports-related experiences on behalf of charities. 

A university spokesperson told Salon in an email that the NCAA had not blocked the arrangement, adding that the Hannitys had been compensating the “volunteer” coach.

“Parr’s relationship with the Hannitys was known to Wake Forest and disclosed to the NCAA and the NCAA did not preclude Parr from being a volunteer coach while receiving compensation from the Hannitys,” the spokesperson said, adding that Wake Forest. “has no involvement with Parr’s housing arrangement.” Asked whether the NCAA had offered an opinion on whether their relationship was appropriate, the spokesperson repeated that the governing body had not prevented Parr from coaching.

Parr came out of retirement to play a doubles match with Patrick in June 2017. They lost in straight sets, 6-2, 6-2. He now coaches at a boarding school in the Winston-Salem area, where he started last October.

The inquiry

The unconventional narrative outlined above at some point drew the attention of a federal prosecutor.

Bresky and Hannity, through their representatives, both said that they were not aware of any such investigation. Salon has reviewed documents and spoken with a person familiar with the case, making clear that one did indeed arise. That investigation, according to those sources, originated in the federal prosecutor’s office in the Eastern District of New York — that is, on Long Island, where Sean Hannity lives, and where Cory Parr lived before he moved to Winston-Salem — and focused on Tony Bresky’s improbable home purchase next door to Hannity’s, and along with that the facts and events of Bresky’s relationship with the Hannitys around the time of Patrick’s recruitment.

The grand jury subpoenaed Bresky’s financial records, but it is not clear whether the coach was himself subpoenaed or whether the documents were obtained directly from his bank. The prosecutors closed the investigation sometime around the summer of 2020 without finding evidence of criminality.

A Wake Forest spokesperson said that neither Bresky nor the university was aware of the investigation, and provided a statement about the home purchase. “Coach Bresky’s housing choice is independent of Wake Forest,” the spokesperson wrote. “However, the Hannitys did not provide any funding towards the purchase of Bresky’s home.”

Harder said this: “Mr. Hannity (including his family and businesses) had nothing to do with Tony Bresky buying an adjacent property, or any financing related to it. Mr. Hannity did not even know that Mr. Bresky was buying the neighboring property until long after the purchase had been completed. The house happened to come on the market after Mr. Hannity had bought his, and the Breskys happened to learn about it, and buy it (with zero assistance from Mr. Hannity) in or around December 2016.”

Those two houses are next door to each other on a cul-de-sac, almost three miles from the Wake Forest tennis center.

The decision to open an inquiry also came in the context of news reporting about Sean Hannity’s real estate transaction history, which not publicly known at the time of Bresky’s purchase. In 2018, the Fox News star drew public scrutiny after The Guardian revealed that he owned more than 20 shell companies which had cumulatively spent at least $90 million on nearly 900 homes in seven different states over the previous decade, including apartment complexes in low-income neighborhoods. The shell companies all had variations of the name of the entity Hannity used to purchase the Winston-Salem house, a combination of his kids’ initials.

Hannity denied any wrongdoing in that case: “The fact is, these are investments that I do not individually select, control, or know the details about; except that obviously I believe in putting my money to work in communities that otherwise struggle to receive such support.”

In April 2020, two years after The Guardian’s report, Morgan Dill, a current teammate of Patrick Hannity at Wake Forest, Morgan Dill, took an internship at an Atlanta-based company called Henssler Financial, which is the firm Hannity used to register those shell companies.

The game

It’s impossible to understand these unusual decisions and the broader impact of their example without discussing Patrick Hannity’s tennis career.

According to both Wake Forest and Harder, who deferred to the school on the issue, Tony Bresky offered Patrick a walk-on spot on the tennis team, and Patrick verbally committed to the school in August 2015, around the beginning of his junior year in high school. Five NCAA compliance experts told Salon that appears to be a violation of recruitment rules, which bar tennis coaches from contacting players before Sept. 1 of their junior year — meaning that Bresky apparently offered Patrick a spot before he was even supposed to send him recruiting materials. If Patrick called the coach, however, rather than the other way around, then no rules were broken. Wake Forest would not say who initiated the contact.

According to the NCAA, a male high school tennis player has a 1.6% chance of landing a spot on a Division I team. There are 264 Division I tennis teams, and Wake Forest is very near the top of the top — the tennis equivalent of Duke in basketball or Alabama in football. It is hard to overstate how good their starting recruits have been: During Bresky’s tenure, the Deacons have consistently ranked in the top 10, won indoor and NCAA national championships in 2018, and the ACC championship in 2019. Patrick Hannity was on those teams, but did not play in those tournament matches.

Wake Forest explained to Salon that every team needs solid walk-on players to give their starters the best practice opponents they can get, and that Patrick qualified on his merits.

“The combination of Patrick’s academic and athletic credentials qualified him for formal admission at that time,” a spokesperson said in an email. “In January 2017, he enrolled at Wake Forest with a 4.2 high school GPA. Patrick was a member of the National Honor Society, he was a four-star tennis recruit, and he was one of the top-10 recruits from the state of New York.”

According to the Tennis Recruiting Network (TRN), an authoritative source on youth tennis, that’s all correct but may be slightly misleading. The “four-star” designation means that a player was ranked somewhere between the 75th and 200th best prospect at a given grade level. Wake Forest’s own signing announcement ranked Patrick 157th nationally in 2016, his junior year. By the next year, after Patrick had left public school for an online program in order to focus on tennis and graduate a semester early, his ranking had fallen to 197. (His younger sister, who plays at the University of Michigan, was a five-star recruit.)

Salon obtained research for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s rankings of the 10 best college men’s tennis teams for  2016 and 2017, which shows that those teams’ U.S. recruits had a median national ranking of 33. TRN also assigns a Ratings Power Index to tennis prospects: While the median rank for the aforementioned recruits was 50, Patrick Hannity was ranked 292 in 2016, and 329 in 2017.

The jet

It is similarly difficult to get concrete information about when Sean Hannity first flew someone affiliated with Wake Forest or its men’s tennis team on his jet. Neither the university nor Harder would say for sure. Harder said by email that to the best of Hannity’s recollection, “nobody from the University flew in the plane until his son was enrolled, and on the tennis team. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share it, and I will discuss with my client.” 

Harder also claimed that Wake had reimbursed Hannity for travel on his private plane, but the school would not answer direct questions on that point. A university spokesperson replied by email: “Patrick committed to Wake Forest prior to Hannity’s purchase of the plane. The University’s use of aircraft and the University’s handling of transportation of its student athletes is a private matter.”

Experts say that the NCAA frowns on “inducements,” although those are ambiguously defined. “The NCAA and its members do not want athletes to receive extra benefits or inducements for choosing a particular school,” Volante, the sports and entertainment lawyer, told Salon. “Despite this, certain schools have nicer facilities, higher profile coaches, etc., that naturally induce athletes to pick one school over another. This is OK since those are things provided directly to the athlete by the school.

“What the NCAA polices against is boosters or third parties offering inducements to athletes that would affect the recruiting process,” Volante continued. “If a donor to a school were to make certain perks and amenities available to a school or individual program for the purpose of inducing athletes to pick that school over another, then it could cross the line into a major infraction by the institution. A series of major infractions would reach the threshold of lack of institutional control, the most serious scenario within NCAA compliance and infractions.”

In February 2018, following Wake Forest’s ITA indoor championship victory, Bresky tweeted a photo of the students, including Patrick, gathered in front of Hannity’s plane. “Time to go home, bringing my girls a little present,” the coach wrote.

Research obtained by Salon shows that in 2019, seven of the top 10 college tennis teams strictly took commercial flights while traveling to or from out-of-town matches and tournaments. One other school chartered a private plane occasionally. And then there was Wake Forest: Within the space of two years, Hannity’s jet appeared more than a dozen times at locations where the Demon Deacons were playing, the research showed. Although Hannity at some point restricted public access to his plane’s flight data, Salon has obtained information showing that the plane made seven trips to or from the Winston-Salem area between Feb. 24 and May 21, 2019. Instagram photos posted by one of Patrick’s teammates show the team using the plane at other times.

NCAA rules do not expressly prohibit someone from donating the use of a private jet for team travel, but that act would make that person a major donor, or “booster.” If the school reimbursed Hannity for the flights, as his attorney claims, however, that would likely not be considered a donation. It is unclear whether Hannity registered as a Wake Forest booster, and because neither Harder nor Wake Forest would say whether the Fox host had charged fair market value for the flights, it is also unclear who benefited, in financial terms, from the team’s use of Hannity’s jet — Hannity or the school.

Among other restrictions, the NCAA bars boosters from engaging in recruiting conversations on behalf of a given school. It is not clear whether Sean Hannity has ever participated in such conversations, but he seems to have been particularly engaged with Wake Forest men’s tennis players, well before his son joined the team.

When Patrick was a high school player, Hannity was close not only with former Deacon Cory Parr, but also Jay Harris, who coached Patrick and ran a training facility that had a recruiting relationship with Wake Forest. According to a profile in the Mansfield News Journal, Harris “helped the younger Hannity through the recruiting process,” which as far as Salon has found chiefly if not exclusively involved Wake Forest. (The Journal also reported in 2014 that Hannity once arranged to have a private jet on the tarmac for Harris, so that “Harris could mentor his academy-attendee son at a high-level tournament.”)

The elder Hannity is also close with former Wimbledon junior singles champion Noah Rubin, who trained at both John McEnroe Tennis Academy and Jay Harris’ Sportime, where Patrick Hannity also trained. After winning the junior title at Wimbledon in 2014, Rubin wanted to turn professional, but instead attended Wake Forest on a scholarship that allowed him to participate part-time in professional events, which he called “a difficult decision.” He dominated college tennis for a year and then left school to become a full-time pro, and is still friends with Hannity.

Hannity’s professional connections, including at Fox News, also appear to include Wake Forest. He gave Noah Rubin’s sister Jessie a college internship at his show before Rubin accepted the Wake scholarship. Rubin’s friend Sam Bloom, a three-time Wake Forest men’s tennis captain, went to work for Fox News as a producer upon his graduation in June 2016, and later married Hannity’s production assistant, Christen Limbaugh — Rush Limbaugh’s niece. These interactions all preceded Patrick Hannity’s enrollment at Wake Forest.

As mentioned above, last April Patrick’s current Wake Forest teammate, Morgan Dill, took an internship at Atlanta-based Henssler Financial, where, as The Guardian first reported in 2018, Hannity registered dozens of “SPMK” shell companies that he has used to purchase at least $90 million worth of real estate.

The money

According to The New York Times college mobility tracker, 22% of all Wake Forest students come from families in the top 1% of the nation in terms of wealth, ranking it fifth on the Times list of 65 elite colleges. Almost 3% of all Deacons come from the top 0.1% wealthiest families in the country.

Serious tennis, of course, is expensive. But some of Patrick Hannity’s wealthy teammates also appear to fall far well short of top-tier Division I prowess — more dramatically than he does, in fact. For instance, Charles Parry and his younger brother Jack — who made the Wake Forest team in different years — are the children of John Parry, a yacht broker in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, who also owns Gold Coffee, one of the largest private producers in the United States. Charles was a two-star recruit — in other words, two full levels below Patrick Hannity — while Jack’s team profile is limited to three high school varsity letters and a title in a boys’ tennis club tournament in Jupiter, Florida. Jack is unrated by Universal Tennis Ratings and ranked 878 in his national recruiting class.

The team’s profile page for 2018 walk-on redshirt Tayte Dupree mentions no tennis accomplishments beyond his presence on a Virginia private school state championship team. He was ranked 602 in his recruiting class. His father, David Dupree, founder of the Halifax Group, a Washington, D.C.-area private equity investment firm, is a part owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team and received the 2016 Wake Forest Distinguished Alumni Award. Dupree and his wife are among five couples who gave $1 million each to kick off Wake Forest’s matching gift program in 2018.

From 2014 to 2017, the operating budget for the Wake Forest men’s tennis team more than doubled, going from $715,000 to more than $1.8 million. It remained at that level in 2018.

That dramatic budget increase tracks with a modest but noticeable increase in roster size. In 2014, the team had 13 players, a number that grew to 15 in 2018 and 17 the next year. The current 2020-2021 team boasts 18 players, significantly larger than the average roster size in men’s college tennis, which the USTA reports is 8 to 12 members. Among the top-10 NCAA teams in 2019, only Wake Forest had more than 13 players; top-ranked Ohio State had 10 players on the roster, while second-ranked Texas had nine. 

In a 2019 podcast interview, Wake Forest coach Tony Bresky suggested that he now had access to as much funding as he needed to recruit the best young talent. He said that the only thing he needed more of was time to travel and watch more players.

“We’ve been – we’ve become – very fortunate at Wake Forest,” Bresky said. “We have some very gracious donors, and our administration has been so supportive of our program. … For us, it’s not a financial issue.”

Sean Hannity is himself a member of Wake Forest’s parent’s athletic council, and has discussed his son and the team on the air. On May 23, 2018, after the school won its first NCAA championship, Hannity told Fox News primetime colleague Laura Ingraham, “I know all the kids on the team. They are amazing kids, they have an amazing coach — Tony Bresky — and you know [Patrick] is a freshman and it is probably the greatest experience so far in his life.”

After that 2018 national championship, Hannity — who was often described as former President Trump’s informal chief of staff — played a key role in scoring the team a White House visit. While NCAA champions frequently receive such honors, the Trump administration was more finicky. The New York Times reported that if not for Hannity, the tennis team would seem “an unlikely choice for a special visit hosted by a president whose administration has planned a crackdown on foreign students who overstay their visas as part of a broader drive to tighten immigration.” All six of the leading singles players on that Wake Forest team had been recruited from other countries, including Croatia, Cyprus, Tunisia and Uzbekistan.

School spokesperson Dan Wallace confirmed that impression, telling the Times that Hannity “helped instigate the talks” that led to the visit. “That was the driving force,” Wallace said.

At the ceremony, Trump, without prompting, called out his ally’s son by name among the Wake Forest players. “Patrick is back there,” the president said. Patrick Hannity had not played a match for the team for months. 

Varsity Blues

In 2019, the “Varsity Blues” college admissions bribery scandal cast a pall over athletics programs at some of the country’s most well-known schools. In response, Hannity published an adapted monologue on the Fox News website entitled, “College admissions scandal shows the new faces of greed, corruption and selfishness,” in which the conservative provocateur bashed the wealthy and well-connected parents who had paid money to game college acceptances for their children, often through fraudulent acceptances to low-profile sports teams.

These parents, Hannity argued, were not acting primarily for the benefit of their children, but for themselves.

Dozens of wealthy families, business executives and yes, Hollywood celebrities, were caught rigging the system, paying huge crimes, fixing even SAT and ACT scores, so their little children, their precious kids could gain admission into some of America’s top universities.

Why? I guess for status, bragging rights, so they could tell their friends that their privileged children got into the best schools, even though in reality, their children weren’t good enough academically or weren’t good enough athletically. To do so, they stomped on the futures of other people.

Hannity also leaned on his own experience as a tennis dad.

This is a zero-sum game. There’s only so many spots in each school. For children who are probably not as financially well-off, or kids who had to work for everything, kids who put in the time academically or athletically.

We’re talking about thousands and thousands of hours studying and training and actually earning their grades or position in their sport. Kids who spent all this time on and off the field to better themselves and enrich the school with their incredible athletic ability. Kids who played sports competitively. Most kids nowadays focus on one sport since about the time they are seven years old. I know because I’ve lived through it.

Hannity did not mention the indictment of Wake Forest’s women’s volleyball coach, Bill Ferguson. (The university itself was specifically targeted in a letter from Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos.) Federal prosecutors alleged that Ferguson, who joined Wake the same month Hannity purchased his Winston-Salem mansion, had illegally accepted $100,000 from a foundation to help a wait-listed student gain admission by pretending the student was a premier volleyball recruit.

After a preliminary hearing, Ferguson’s attorney suggested that the player had not been placed on the team unfairly: “Two weeks ago, the U.S. attorney told you about a litany of abuses: phony test scores, unqualified students, falsified athletic profiles. Well I can’t speak to what happened at any other school, but not at Wake Forest University. No one, no one was admitted to Wake Forest who didn’t earn it as a student and as an athlete,” he said.

Higher prices and slower deliveries: How Louis DeJoy plans to sabotage the Postal Service once more

In the wake of a months-long string of operational failures and dramatic rollbacks endured by the U.S. Postal Service, Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is reportedly planning to undercut the Postal Service once more. Although DeJoy’s plan has yet to be unveiled, according to the Washington Post, it is expected to yield significantly higher postage rates and slower mail, a devastating blow for consumers and businesses already in financial straits amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

Multiple sources told NBC News that DeJoy intends to eliminate first-class mail, pooling all deliveries into a three to five-day delivery window instead. The move would cause a backlog of mail, making the overall cost of delivery skyrocket.

DeJoy’s plan, said to “raise revenue” for the Postal Service, would pile on to the many policies he has already instituted that severely undercut the Postal Service’s delivery system. These policies –– instituted during the election, when the voters were relying heavily on mail-in-ballots –– included the reduction of mail-sorting machines, cutting overtime for workers, and scaling back the number of mailboxes across the country.   

“Over the past eight months,” DeJoy said in an email to NBC News, “our executive leadership team has been working on developing a comprehensive 10-year strategy to address the serious but solvable challenges of the Postal Service that commits to six and seven day a week delivery service,” adding, “This work is not only needed, it is long overdue.”

DeJoy, a longtime Trump donor, has been the subject of widespread outrage by Democratic lawmakers, many of whom have called upon President Joe Biden to oust members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors, all of whom Trump appointed.

Last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., called on Biden to “restore accountability and credibility” and “send a message to future leaders that silence in the face of a campaign of sabotage will not be tolerated” by firing every single Postal governor. This would likely result in a new Postmaster General, a position voted on by the governors themselves. 

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., tweeted on Friday that the Postmaster General “has been on a mission to send the USPS into a death spiral,” condemning the Board of Governors as “a cabal of cowards, complicit in DeJoy’s attacks, derelict in their duties, and unwilling to hold the postmaster accountable.”

The House Oversight Committee is set to hold a hearing with DeJoy, as well as several Postal Service officials to “examine legislative proposals to place the Postal Service on a more sustainable financial footing going forward.”

Biden’s handling of the controversy will prove consequential for the Postal Service, which has historically netted annual losses for over a decade. Just last year, it announced a $9.2 billion loss, with less than a third of all three- to five-day mail delivered on time. Much of the Postal Service’s financial woes stem from a Republican-pushed requirement that it fund employee pensions into the future, to an extent required by no other government agency.

The White House said Monday that President Biden intends to fill the Board with newly-appointed governors who will “reflect his commitment to the workers of the U.S. Postal Service [and] who deliver on the post office’s vital universal service obligation.” 

Psychiatrist James Gordon: How we begin to heal America’s collective trauma

The Age of Trump and its ongoing aftermath have caused a collective state of PTSD among the American people. Trump’s attempted coup and the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 have exacerbated the trauma. Trump’s second impeachment and second acquittal by Senate Republicans — despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt — has retraumatized many Americans who hoped or believed that the election of Joe Biden would bring relief from continued abuse by Trump and his followers.

Members of Congress were themselves traumatized by the lethal Jan. 6 attack by Trump’s mob. The second impeachment trial reactivated their pain.

Joe Biden and many leading Democrats keep preaching the need for “unity” and “bipartisanship.” Democrats seem constitutionally unwilling or unable to admit that the Republican Party and broader right wing view them as an existential enemy.

Of course, there is also the ongoing national trauma of hundreds of thousands of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic and the economic destruction caused by the Trump regime’s willful sabotage of relief efforts.

America is broken in many ways, and there seems to be no true closure or real healing in sight. To borrow from novelist Chinua Achebe, suffering and trouble have shown up on America’s doorstep and taken up residence inside. That trouble and suffering show no signs of leaving any time soon.

What steps can be taken to begin healing America’s collective state of pain, trauma and suffering?

To approach that enormous question, I reached out to Dr. James Gordon, one of the world’s leading experts on how to heal population-wide psychological trauma. Gordon has worked in such war-torn regions of the world as the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. He is a psychiatrist, a former National Institute of Mental Health researcher and a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School. He chaired the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Dr. Gordon is also the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

Gordon and his work have been featured in such leading news outlets and programs as “60 Minutes,” the New York Times and the Washington Post. His most recent book is “Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing.”

In this conversation, Gordon explained that Joe Biden represents a calm and reasonable approach to leadership, and that such energy offers an important first step for healing from the chaos and pain caused by the Trump regime. He also cautioned that we need a collective effort to understand how the pain and anxiety of this moment is present in all of us: in Trump’s followers who attacked the Capitol as well as in those Americans who oppose Trump’s movement.

Gordon also said he has been in communication with members of Congress about the process of healing from the pain and trauma caused by Trump’s coup attack, and about the challenges they face in terms of justice, accountability and healing, given the possibility that Republican members may have aided and abetted the deadly events of Jan. 6.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The United States is experiencing trauma on a society-wide level. Donald Trump may no longer be president, but he remains a public menace. There was a second impeachment. Right-wing extremism and related violence will be a threat for a long time to come. There is structural violence. There is the pandemic and all its devastation. There are deep and long-standing problems with social inequality and injustice in the nation more generally. As a society, how can we better manage all this pain and trauma?

These are public crises, but they are impacting us personally. That is why it is so important that President Biden is a soothing voice of sanity. Whether one agrees with Biden or not, he is not trying to rile people up. That is very helpful. This creates a feeling of calm and a more realistic perspective on events. Yes, the situation in the country is serious, even grave. But there are things we can do to take positive steps, and those steps are going to be somewhat different for different people. We have to understand that.

We also have to understand that everybody is impacted by what is going on in the country — including those people who stormed the Capitol. Their rage and difficulty in seeing any kind of alternative perspective are symptoms of trauma and ongoing stress too. The country is experiencing nationwide trauma since last year with the pandemic and other consequences. We are seeing anxiety, depression and suicide rates going up, particularly among young people.

One of the reasons why it is important to be talking with other people — including those people with whom one disagrees — is just to understand that we are all in this together. At the same time that we’re in this together, we also need to take care of ourselves. We need to come into balance so we can best deal with this difficult situation. That is the type of work that I have done with whole populations that had been traumatized during wars, after wars, after hurricanes and earthquakes, and in the midst of opioid epidemics and after school shootings.

What do we do in a country where there are tens of millions of people who look at Donald Trump and his antisocial behavior as a role model and example? Trump has given his followers permission for the worst kinds of behavior. How do we even go about the work of confronting and healing our collective trauma given these facts?

For example, what Joe Biden is doing is setting another kind of example. We tend to embrace leaders who embody characteristics that for one reason or another resonate with us. Unfortunately, we do not also look at those leaders’ characteristics as objectively as we should. We tend to either embrace them or shun them. Both such responses are limited. People who simply embrace Trump and the alternative reality that he presents have shut themselves off from other possibilities for reasons that likely vary from person to person.

Some people I have spoken with embrace Trump’s reality because in their minds it is good for their business. They may not like his rudeness, crudeness, misogyny and racism, but what is most important to them is their business and survival.

The people who follow Trump feel they have been neglected. They feel that they are not cared for by the “elites” and by the government. They feel mistrustful. They feel badly treated. They see someone who, at least in what he has to say, seems to represent somebody who cares about them. They do not ask themselves or research if he really cares about them. They dismiss other kinds of behavior from Trump that are anathema to them.

Other people love that behavior. Trump’s sticking it to the people who they believe are sticking it to them — whatever that means. That could be people with fancy educations who lives on the coasts. Other races or other ethnicities, who they feel are trying to take things away from people like them. Trump promised to defend them against those forces that they feel are oppressive or insulting or demeaning to them in some way or other.

We need a profound change of mind. That can happen when there is an alternative offered which feels equally compelling and satisfying. That is the public challenge the Biden administration is facing. I believe that Joe Biden is doing his best to say, “I care about you. I’m not one of those people who has contempt. I’m not somebody who thinks you’re a ‘deplorable.’ I’m somebody who cares about you, and here are actions that show it.” This is going to be a slow process here in America. It is not going to happen overnight.

For people who hated Trump and thought he was totally worthless and beneath contempt, it is crucial for us to try to understand that there are in fact people who have a religious devotion to Trump. Many of the white evangelicals genuinely believe and see him as a King Cyrus figure or a Nebuchadnezzar figure. People sincerely believe that. Those who disagree are not going to argue them out of that belief.

This is their reality. There are evangelicals who believe that modern events in various ways recapitulate Biblical events. If we who are outside of that community are going to talk with them, we need to understand that we cannot just dismiss them or say that they are crazy.

When I look at Trump and his followers, I see people I want nothing to do with. They have shown themselves to be an existential threat to multiracial democracy and nonwhite people. Biden wants “unity” and “coming together” with them. I and many others reject the very premise of coming together with people who want to hurt us, and who have shown themselves to be part of a treasonous movement. What does healing look like then?

That’s a significant problem. I’ll tell you where I come from. I’m interested in healing the whole community, whether it’s a local small community or the whole national community. What I have found helpful, in similar situations where people feel each other as existential threats, is to create a program to teach people skills for self-care and to help them create support groups for themselves. We open the training up to everyone.

For example, right after the war in Kosovo we began to work both separately and jointly with the Serbs and the Albanians. A few weeks earlier, they were literally killing each other. What happens as they come together in the training sessions is that they want to have nothing to do with each other. They sit apart from each other. But they are in a small group and they’re mixed together.  The first group drew pictures. Three of them where you draw yourself, yourself with your biggest problem, and yourself with your problem solved. The amazing thing to these people was that the pictures of the biggest problem were almost identical, except the identities were reversed.

They’d look at these drawings and they see how similar the drawings are, and that gives them a point of connection: “You’re as scared of me as I am of you. There’s just as much anger that you have for me as I have for you.” As the groups go on, the points of connection increase, and the sharing too — which at first is skimpy because they don’t trust each other. They eventually begin to see the humanity of each other and that can be the basis for some kind of connection.

America needs a truth and reconciliation committee or similar process to have some accountability and then perhaps healing from the crimes and other harm committed by the Trump regime and its allies. What would such a process look like?

First of all, Desmond Tutu is a friend, he’s on the advisory board of my Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and he’s a great teacher to me. I’ve been talking with people in Congress who are asking the same question that you’re asking, and who don’t know how they’re going to go about creating such a process. They are saying, “How am I going to forgive and have a working relationship, and maybe even a personal relationship, with people who at least gave tacit approval to these people who rioted and threatened my life?”

These congresspeople are saying they don’t know how to do that right now,” and I say, “The answer will come as you deal with your own issues, your own rage, and your own sense of betrayal. As you come into physiological balance, as you share your experience with people with whom you can share your experience. I don’t know what the answer is going to be.”

I do not know if there’s going to be a truth and reconciliation commission such as what took place in South Africa. Such societies — I am doing similar work in Sudan — have a tradition where there are different ways of coming to a reconciliation, ways of going to family or a community you have wronged, and apologizing and giving something to them. We do not have that here in America.

How do you counsel Democrats to sit across from someone who wished them harm? If I was one of the Democrats I would want any Republican who aided and abetted the attackers in any way to be expelled from Congress and face criminal and civil punishments. How can there be forgiveness without accountability? How can we have healing without consequences?

They’re not mutually exclusive. With Congress, the public part of that accountability, the institutional part, is calling the alleged participants to account. It is saying, “You did this. We should censure you.” That’s fine. As far as any kind of forgiveness, one has to see how that evolves, and if it does. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I do not know what they’re going to say to the other people in Congress. For my part, I’m happy to help them with the healing process, insofar as I can.

Are Senate Democrats splintering over the fight for $15?

On Tuesday, fast-food workers in 15 different cities across the U.S. went on strike to demand $15 an hour wages from McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. In the midst of a pandemic and ensuing unemployment crisis, Democrats are poised to meet that demand and increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour — a move that would boost incomes for 32 million workers across the country, many of whom work in jobs deemed essential and front-line during the pandemic — but a couple of Democratic senators look to be standing in the way. 

“We’re feeling really good. We think we’ve got a good shot,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told reporters last week. “We’ve got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour and that’s what the American people want and that’s what I intend to do.”

A Covid-19 relief bill was approved in the Democratic-controlled House Education and Labor Committee last week that includes increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour, over a period of 4 years.  But Democrats who narrowly control the Senate can’t afford to lose any votes, so recent rumblings from Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin have progressive activists concerned.

“What’s important is whether or not it’s directly related to short-term Covid relief. And if it’s not, then I am not going to support it in this legislation,” Sinema told Politico last week. In an attempt to shake hands with moderate voters in Arizona, Sinema might just be chastising herself. Polls have long found that raising the minimum wage is extremely popular. A $15 minimum wage would bring almost 1 million Americans out of poverty in the next four years, as stated in a recent report published by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 

Increasing the federal minimum wage was popular in swing districts across the country, according to a poll conducted last fall by the National Employment Law Project. 62% of those polled, including 59% in predominantly Republican districts, preferred hiking the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025. 

“The minimum wage provision is not appropriate for the reconciliation process,” Sinema contested, expressing concern that a debate over a minimum wage hike would slow down the rollout of the relief package. “It is not a budget item. And it shouldn’t be in there,” she argued. Sinema was the first Democrat from Arizona to win a seat in the Senate in over 30 years, causing her to tread with trepidation. 

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia also pushed back, arguing that $15 minimum wage doesn’t translate to his state the way it does to states like California, where cost of living is exponentially higher. “I’m supportive of, basically, having something that’s responsible and reasonable,” he said. Manchin’s support is crucial, being a necessary swing vote, in order to pass the current relief bill. In a hopeful sign, progressive activists announced that Manchin reached out on Monday to schedule a time to discuss the minimum wage and issues of poverty. 

“This Black History Month, we have a chance to make our own history by winning a living wage of at least $15 an hour and lifting millions of families out of poverty,” said Taiwanna Milligan, from Charleston, South Carolina who works at McDonald’s. She’s participating in the Black History Month strike because she said “McDonald’s has made billions in profit off of the backs of workers like me, paying us starvation wages.”

So far, Democratic leadership in both chambers is standing with striking workers over moderate Democrats. Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer the final bill passed out of the House and Senate respectfully will include the minimum wage hike and signed into law before March 14, when key unemployment programs expire.

 

Joe Scarborough tears into Josh Hawley for tuning out during Trump’s impeachment trial

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough lambasted Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for dismissing Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and turning a blind eye to the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

During Thursday’s monologue on “Morning Joe,” tensions were high as Scarborough suggested that the reason Hawley tuned out during the trial is that he is complicit in the Capitol riots given his repeated promotion of false claims of a stolen election.

“You have people that are clearly unfit to serve in the United States Capitol, in the United States Senate,” Scarborough said. “Of course, if you’re Josh Hawley, you actually are the person who led the insurrection. You’re the person most responsible — other than Donald Trump — for that insurrection. You’re the person most responsible for a police officer being beaten to death. You’re the person most responsible for the cop killing, for the cop beating, for the abusing.”

Scarborough went on to criticize other Republican senators who are following in Hawley’s footsteps, including Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas. 

“While we see an American tragedy unfolding piece by piece, bit by bit, in front of our very eyes,” he said.

He added, “There are no words for people like Hawley, and Cruz, and Rubio, and Rick Scott, who claim this is a waste of our time… But there will be a political judgment at the polls for them. This ends really badly for the party that’s already lost the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.”

It was one of the many times Scarborough has criticized Hawley for his action and inaction. 

When Simon & Schuster canceled Hawley’s book deal, the senator went on Twitter to express his dismay at the decision made. On Jan.8, Scarborough hit back at Hawley’s response and cited an example, “…I decide to commit treason against the United States of America. I decide to commit acts of sedition as Josh Hawley did. I decide to lead an insurrection against the United States of America and inspire actually the ravaging of the United States…I think my publisher has the right to cancel my contract. That’s free enterprise at work.”

Hawley’s canceled book deal wasn’t enough to hold him back from appearing on KTVO prior to the impeachment trial in the Senate. During the interview, he said, “The Constitution doesn’t give the Senate the power to try and convict private citizens. I mean, it just doesn’t.”

He added, “Our founders made the choice not to do that, to limit the power of the Senate, and you can see why because if ex-presidents can be tried and convicted once they are out of office, my goodness, every time we have a switch in party, you’re going to see now the majority party coming in and saying let’s try the ex-president.”

Robert Reich: No compromising with the GOP cult

I keep hearing that Joe Biden has to govern from the “center.” He has no choice, they say, because he has razor-thin majorities in Congress and the Republican Party has moved to the right.

Rubbish. First, there is no “center” between the reality-based world and the conspiracy-fueled, hate-filled world of today’s Republican Party. Second, the problems the country is facing cannot be solved with milquetoast, centrist solutions — they demand immediate, bold action.

I’ve been in or around politics for 50 years. I’ve served several Democratic presidents who have needed Republican votes. But the Republicans now in Congress are nothing like those I’ve dealt with.

Today’s Republican Party is a cult.

93 percent of House Republicans voted against impeaching Trump for inciting an insurrection, and Senate Republicans refuse to convict him. This is after Trump’s insurrection threatened even their own lives.

The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are facing backlash from their colleagues, with some even calling to remove Liz Cheney from her leadership position. 

But hardly any have condemned the vile conspiracy theories spouted by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has claimed that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were “false flags” and that the deadly California wildfires were sparked by a Jewish space laser, among other wild lies.

All of this marks the culmination of the GOP’s growing lunacy over the last four years. With Trump at its head, the Republican Party has embraced blatant white supremacy, and now inhabits a counterfactual wonderland of lies and conspiracies.

Even by mid-January, polls show three out of four Republicans don’t think Biden won legitimately. 45 percent support the storming of the Capitol; 57 percent say Trump should be the Republican candidate in 2024.

And a growing fringe — including some Republicans in Congress — openly talk of redressing grievances through violence.

With this Republican Party, Biden cannot be a “centrist.” 

Instead, he must deliver bold change for the American people, refusing to compromise with violent Trumpism. Barring Trump from ever holding public office again. Expelling Trump’s co-conspirators from Congress. 

Don’t listen to people claiming this would be a “distraction” from Biden’s agenda. There is no healing without accountability. If we let those who incited this insurrection off the hook, we’re inviting it to happen again. And next time they might succeed.

It should all be part of Biden’s agenda. Biden must fight for democracy and against authoritarianism — including strengthening voting rights, getting big money out of politics, and taking on the Republican Party’s anti-democratic agenda of gerrymandering and voter suppression. 

There is no longer a “center” in American politics. No middle ground between lies and facts. No halfway point between civil discourse and violence. No midrange between democracy and fascism.

We either have a future based on lies, violence, and authoritarianism — or on unyielding truth, unshakeable civility, and democracy. Biden and the Democrats must fight for the latter. And we must make them. 

Citing anti-KKK law, NAACP and Democratic congressman sue Trump over Capitol attack

The NAACP, Rep. Bennie Thompson, and a leading civil rights law firm on Tuesday sued former President Donald Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, and right-wing groups for allegedly conspiring to incite last month’s deadly attack on the United States Capitol. 

The suit (pdf)—filed by the civil rights group and the law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—accuses Trump, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers of directly violating the Enforcement Act of 1871 by attempting to prevent Congress from performing its official duties on January 6.

The Reconstruction-era law, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, originally allowed then-President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend habeas corpus, declare martial law, and deploy federal troops to fight KKK terrorism and enforce the 14th Amendment after the Civil War.

The new suit alleges that “on and before January 6, 2021, the defendants… conspired to incite an assembled crowd to march upon and enter the Capitol of the United States for the common purpose of disrupting, by the use of force, intimidation, and threat, the approval by Congress of the count of votes cast by members of the Electoral College as required by Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.”

“In doing so,” it states, “the defendants each intended to prevent, and ultimately delayed, members of Congress from discharging their duty commanded by the United States Constitution to approve the results of the Electoral College in order to elect the next president and vice president of the United States.”

In addition to Thompson (D-Miss.)—who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee—other lawmakers including Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) are expected to join the suit in the coming days, according to a NAACP statement.

“January 6th was one of the most shameful days in our country’s history, and it was instigated by the president himself,” Thompson said in a statement. “His gleeful support of violent white supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger. It is by the slimmest of luck that the outcome was not deadlier.”

“While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the president accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatantly planned,” added Thompson. “Failure to do so will only invite this type of authoritarianism for the anti-democratic forces on the far right that are so intent on destroying our country.”

Despite additional evidence underscoring Trump’s failure to act to stop the assault on the Capitol—which left five people dead—only seven Republican senators voted on Saturday to convict the former president for inciting the attack. Trump was impeached by the House a historic second time on January 13.

“Donald Trump needs to be held accountable for deliberately inciting and colluding with white supremacists to stage a coup, in his continuing efforts to disenfranchise African-American voters,” said NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson. “The insurrection was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated, monthslong plan to destroy democracy, to block the results of a fair and democratic election, and to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of African-American voters who cast valid ballots.”

Johnson added that the lawsuit was filed “to protect our democracy and make sure nothing like what happened on January 6th ever happens again.”

Trump strikes back at McConnell: “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack”

Former President Donald Trump lashed out at Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday, but his statement could reportedly have been even more insulting.

“The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” Trump said. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse. The Democrats and Chuck Schumer play McConnell like a fiddle—they’ve never had it so good—and they want to keep it that way! We know our America First agenda is a winner, not McConnell’s Beltway First agenda or Biden’s America Last.”

“My only regret is that McConnell ‘begged’ for my strong support and endorsement before the great people of Kentucky in the 2020 election, and I gave it to him. He went from one point down to 20 points up, and won. How quickly he forgets. Without my endorsement, McConnell would have lost, and lost badly. Now, his numbers are lower than ever before, he is destroying the Republican side of the Senate, and in so doing, seriously hurting our Country,” Trump charged. “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again. He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country. Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.”

The statement could have been even worse.

“One person close to the former president said his initial version of the statement was more incendiary than what was released publicly. A second person said the statement was issued instead of the news conference that Mr. Trump had initially planned to give on Tuesday; some aides had feared he would go off track and say even harsher things extemporaneously,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Politico reported on the specifics.

“A personal familiar with the crafting of the statement confirmed that it could have been far worse. An earlier draft mocked McConnell for having multiple chins, the person said. But Trump was convinced by advisers to take it out,” Politico reported.

With “Young Rock,” is Dwayne Johnson starting his presidential campaign 10 years early?

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has not publicly ruled out a presidential run. This is an understandable strategy from a man keenly aware of his popularity and the power of projecting the right image, which in Johnson’s case is a sort of a souped-up man of the people.

He’s the chosen family-friendly hero of our times for precisely that reason, with some version of himself available and accessible to everyone, whether via “The Fast and the Furious” franchise or “Jumanji,” by way of his inspirational reality competition “The Titan Games” or Elizabeth Warren’s favorite HBO show “Ballers.”

Setting limits on possibilities is precisely the opposite of Johnson’s brand, and that’s why NBC’s “Young Rock” by its very existence may be the canniest commentary going about the perilous intersection of fame, personality and political power. It might be that or an inoffensive sitcom with big tent ambitions that takes a few episodes to organize its approach.

Or it could end up being something media reporters look back on from 2032 with some measure of self-loathing for not recognizing it as a slicker replay of 2015, with NBC once again having been tricked into providing free campaign advertising for a guy mounting a charm offensive. The difference is this time the candidate in question is on the company payroll.

This is a whole lot of forehead-furrowing paranoia to drape onto an otherwise harmless, heartwarming family comedy from Johnson and co-showrunners Nahnatchka Khan and Jeff Chiang, who worked together on “Fresh Off the Boat.”

I’ll also confess that some of this apprehension is for display only. Just as Johnson can sculpt and oil his powers of enticement with equivalent levels of care with which he treats his physique, it’s only fair for writers to at the very least make a show of assessing of Johnson’s motivations here.

Maybe “Young Rock” is simply a “The Wonder Years” built for 2021 and purveying universally relatable life lessons in primetime. That it is also loosely based on the childhood of a real person with a gigantic fandom isn’t original either, as anyone who’s seen “Everybody Hates Chris” can attest.

However, Chris Rock was never seen looking back on this pre-adolescent awkwardness during campaign stops in 2032, which is a lot closer than you may realize.

This not-at-all-meant-to-be-taken-literally-or-seriously writing of Johnson’s future endeavors has him traveling the nation in a bus emblazoned with a hologram of himself winking and smiling at The People.

For at least two stops (episodes) in this future Randall Park interviews him as part of an “all-access” coverage deal Park’s show has with Johnson’s campaign, and in their conversations, Johnson comes off as a personable “man for all mankind” figure who despite his obvious success is quick to point out that he’s no better than anyone else. “Nobody’s perfect and we all screw up. I just happened to screw up a little bit more than most.”

This, by the way, probably would have been a smarter campaign slogan than the one on the side of his bus: “Just hang on, I’m coming.”

Depending on the level of PTSD your body is still holding onto after the last five years, all of this is either fun or may feel just a little too soon to merrily joke about. Johnson would be the highest-paid celebrity in Hollywood for two years running if a critical mass of Americans didn’t love him. Flip this and you have another celebrity winning the presidency, and an actual wrestler this time instead of a fool pretending to be one.

Are we really ready for The Johnson Presidency: Redux? And what are the chances that this President Johnson avoids impeachment? Andrew Johnson couldn’t manage to.

The campaign narrative conceit distracts from lovely family relationships at the solid center of the show, namely Johnson’s loving ties to wrestler father Rocky Johnson (Joseph Lee Anderson) and the close bond he shares with his mother Ata (Stacey Leilua).

A much more troublesome distraction presents itself in the pilot where Khan, who wrote the episode, attempts to herd the four timelines in which the series takes place into one cohesive unit. The result is a  disorderly cage match between four time periods in Johnson’s life, each competing for dominance.

Taken separately the three stages of Young Rock serve distinct purposes, each contributing to the overall charismatic mien that we connect with (and that sells movie tickets) in present-day and 2032-era Johnson.

First and all at once, we meet Dwayne in 1982 at the age of 10 (Adrian Groulx), where Rocky is a star wrestler in a Hawaiian wrestling outfit run by Ata’s mother Lia (Ana Tuisila). Then we leap off those ropes into 1987, when the family is struggling to make ends meet and teen Dwayne (Bradley Constant) has taken up his father’s habit of exaggerating his success with a side of shoplifting.

Two episodes provided to critics focus solely on these timelines and this streamlining hints at the show finding its stride. Before it can settle into this rhythm, though, we also zip onward to 1990, where Dwayne (Uli Latukefu) has a chance to remake his image at the University of Miami by muscling his way into the starting ranks of the football team.

Nobody can deny that Johnson has an incredible story apart from a family legacy connecting him to pro-wresting titans.

Its tough to find much fault in its foundation of wholesome nostalgia, which receives a fuller airing in the second episode when Constant’s Dwayne learns a lesson in respect and dignity, sticking by his down-on-his-luck dad when he’s reduced to providing live entertainment at the local flea market while Ata cleans houses.

People struggling to wrap their arms around initial episodes of “Young Rock” may find a reason to stick around in the show’s outstanding crew of actors impersonating such ’80s-era wrestling legends as Ric Flair and Iron Sheik. That much the show nails straightaway, and a sixth episode adventure featuring a day out with Andre the Giant (Matthew Willig) is especially enchanting. Willig channels the lovable tenderness of the towering icon which a gentle joy capable of melting away all doubts about this show.

In those moments we see what “Young Rock” may yet become. What plans its creator has for the future remains unclear; he’s a registered independent who endorsed Joe Biden in this election. He also appeared in grand and vocal fashion at the 2000 Republican convention. And some of the greeting card wisdom he drops during his fantasy campaign stops, like his devotion to valuing “unique people with wildly different points of view,” has a tinny sound to it these post-insurrection days. Like wrestling itself, there’s nothing insincere his devotion to that. But he may be working the gimmick a little hard right now.

“Young Rock” premieres Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. on NBC.

Andrew Yang fails to show his authentic “New Yorker-ness” in a revealing tweet about Shake Shack

In the “Valentine’s Day” episode of the second season of “The Office,” Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) traverses from Scranton, Pa., to New York for a meeting with Dunder Mifflin corporate. “The meeting isn’t until three, but I always like to come a little early,” Michael explains to the camera. “This is where I do my haunts.” 

Scott walks down the street, before exclaiming, “Oh, look! My favorite New York pizza place. I’m going to go get me a New York slice.” When the camera pans up, he’s pointing to a Sbarro — a pizza chain that once occupied a slot at the top of the mall rat food pyramid.

It’s a moment that’s absolutely steeped in cringe — which is the default setting for many of the show’s most memorable episodes like “Dinner Party” and “Scott’s Tots” — because it’s such a clear indicator of who the real Michael Scott is on the inside. He very confidently asserts his opinions about what is accurate or authentic despite not typically having the background to support such statements. He also longs for approval, but to people who know better, he comes off as a clueless, if lovable, try-hard. 

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, who is currently preparing for a mayoral run in New York, made a Twitter post this weekend with definite shades of Michael Scott. 

“Does Shake Shack still count as an NY restaurant? My boys say yes,” Yang tweeted on Feb. 13, alongside an image of a Shake Shack burger, fries and a shake. “I remember waiting in line at the original Madison Square Park location — those were the days.” 

The post sparked some immediate, though mostly lighthearted pushback. If Yang was a real New Yorker, wouldn’t he have said “on line” instead of “in line”? Some asked whether the politician had visited other old-school New York establishments, like Bubba Gump Shrimp Company or the M&M store.

Yes, Shake Shack was started in New York, but it’s now an international chain that was roundly criticized for receiving a $10 million loan intended for small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program. So why did Yang use his platform to highlight Shake Shack over a local restaurant that’s ailing from the COVID-19 pandemic? 

Yang has made attempts to assert his “New York-ness” ever since announcing his run for mayor in a January video directed by Darren Aronofsky, who was born in Brooklyn. In the footage, Yang, who was born in Schenectady and grew up in Westchester, explains that he “moved to Morningside Heights” in 1996. (He went to Columbia Law School.)

“He strolls through Coney Island, grabs a slice of pizza, ribs the Knicks and debates the superiority of Gray’s Papaya versus Papaya King with his wife, Evelyn. (‘Gray’s Papaya,’ he answers, confidently),” wrote the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman.

He continued, “But Yang’s rollout immediately tripped over a series of authenticity tests. A Times piece pointed out that he has never voted in a New York mayoral election, and that he has spent most of the pandemic not at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment but at his weekend house, in New Paltz, or (horrors!) campaigning for Democrats in Pennsylvania and Georgia. ‘Is he a New Yorker? I don’t even know,’ one business leader said.” 

Yang continued on with what Shulman described as a “social-media authenticity blitz.” The politician posted a video of himself at what he claimed was as a bodega, where he bought green tea and bananas. But the midtown shop looked a little too sleek for some viewers, and it sparked a debate over what differentiates a bodega from a deli or convenience store.

Yang, undeterred, went on to post about sampling pickles on the Lower East Side and visiting a food pantry in Flushing. “I’m learning a lot about my city,” he tweeted at the time. 

It’s not unusual for politicians to attempt to engender belonging in their respective communities or in places where they’re campaigning through their food choices. There’s something both primal and endearing about the sentiment of eating together as a way to bond over shared ideals.

But it’s a precarious proposition, one that could easily backfire and expose how much of an outsider you actually may be. Political history is filled with similar gaffes: John Kasich eating pizza with a knife and fork; John Kerry ordering a Philly Cheesesteak with Swiss cheese instead of Cheez Whiz; and 2000 Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer falling backwards off a New Hampshire campaign stage while trying to flip a pancake.

The clearest example of this was in 1976, when former President Gerald Ford was running for re-election against future President Jimmy Carter. Ford and his team made a stop in San Antonio to visit the Alamo. While there, he was offered a plate of tamales. What followed was one of the most memorable campaign trail faux pas. Lila Cockrell, who was mayor at the time, remembers watching as Ford bit into a still-husked tamale.

“I think he just picked up the plate, because if someone had given him the plate, the tamales would not have had the shucks,” Cockrell said. “The president didn’t know any better. It was obvious he didn’t get a briefing on the eating of tamales.”

Ford nearly choked on the dry husk, and the Texas media trailing the candidate had a field day. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who was living in the state at the time, said in an interview with Sporkful that every newscast in Texas broadcasted footage all weekend long of Ford gagging on a tamale. 

“To this day, I am convinced that it was that gaffe with the tamale that cost him the state of Texas,” Huckabee said. 

It’s unlikely that Yang’s Shake Shack tweet alone will have a similar effect on his campaign, but it has opened him up to a fair amount of ribbing about how authentically “New York” he is, and in turn, his plans for real people who live outside of the curated pages of his eat-the-city political playbook. 

After the bodega fiasco, Yang signed back online to find that thousands of Twitter users had logged on just to roast him. His response was simple, “Haha I love New York” (alongside a smiley face).

Time will tell if New York will grow to love Yang in return.

Jim Jordan mocked for “monumentally dumb” attempt to defend Trump

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) found himself in the midst of a Twitter firestorm when he posed a mind-boggling question about the U.S. Capitol riots in former President Donald Trump’s defense. 

On Thursday, Jordan argued that Trump could not have been responsible for inciting the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol because it was pre-planned before Trump’s “Save America” rally. He went on to highlight details about the disturbing evidence that suggests the riots were premeditated, HuffPost reports.

“How do you incite a riot that was already going to happen?”Jordan asked. “Pipe bombs were placed near the Capitol before President Trump’s speech. -The FBI knew about potential violence before the speech. -Capitol Police requested help from the National Guard days before the speech.”

Twitter users wasted no time firing back at Jordan. Almost immediately after Jordan tweeted his arguments, he was lambasted with a flood of fiery tweets.

Political blogger Greg Sargent described Jordan’s tweet as “monumentally dumb,” saying, “Hard to overstate how monumentally dumb this argument is. 1) Trump told them to “preplan” Jan 6 for weeks and weeks. He incited it on the day *and* in the weeks leading up to it. 2) Many rioters who “preplanned” said in their own words that Trump had told them to do it.”

One Twitter user also wrote, “This is not as persuasive as you think at getting us to believe that Trump was trying to *avoid* violence when he told the crowd to go to the Capitol.” 

Another Twitter user recounted Trump’s actions leading up to the deadly insurrection and how he laid the groundwork for the attack. Despite Jordan’s arguments, the user reminded him that Trump’s dangerous tweets and false claims about the election being stolen along with his rhetoric during the rally ultimately led to the riots.

“You tweet about it dozens of times for weeks and then tell the people that you’re going with them to the Capitol when you’re really going back to the White House to watch them attack Congress on TV?” another Twitter user wrote.

Others also fired back with interesting questions as they destroyed Jordan’s defense.

So could the Capitol insurrection have occurred without Trump’s influence? Georgetown University professor Don Moynihan dismantled that argument tweeting, “The House Managers have made an effective case that the origins of the attack were not on the day itself, but Trump’s months-long Big Lie and call to fight, and summoning his supporters to DC on Jan 6th. Can anyone seriously believe the attack would have occurred without Trump?”

Trump’s second impeachment trial is currently underway.

Dreaming of growing your produce? It’s easier than you think

Food definitely tastes better when it’s made with fresh ingredients, and if you don’t have a farmers market nearby (or even if you do!), why not try growing your own produce this year? A lot of people are intimidated by the idea of cultivating a vegetable garden — I know I was! — but with the right tools and intel, it’s easier than you might think.

Where there’s a will to grow a vegetable garden, there’s definitely a way, no matter how much space or experience you have. Sure, gardening often takes some trial and error, but the worst thing that can happen is your plants don’t make it, in which case you can simply try again next year! (I know, I know. It feels bad when plants die, but part of gardening is learning not to take it so personally.)

If you’re ready to get your hands dirty and sow your very own plot of veggies, here are some expert tips to get you going in the right direction.

1. Pick the right spot

Even if you don’t have a large yard, you’ll want to consider the lighting and conditions of the spot where you’re going to plant. The Old Farmer’s Almanac explains that vegetables need around six hours of direct sunlight each day, so you’ll want to pick an area away from trees or the shade of your house.

Further, you’ll want to choose a space that doesn’t get overly wet or dry during the summer, as either of these conditions can hurt your plants.

If your yard has less-than-ideal conditions, don’t fret. Certain plants are more tolerant than others! For instance, veggies like kale, swiss chard, and carrots can all grow in partially shaded areas.

2. Start small and pick easy plants

Just like with houseplants, some vegetables are more forgiving and easier to grow than others. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists squash, beans, kale, cucumbers, and carrots among some of the easiest plants to grow from seed. Tomatoes are also rather easy to care for, but you’ll have better luck if you purchase young plants from a local nursery and transplant them into your garden. I’ve even been able to grow cherry tomatoes from the patio of my apartment using a large nursery pot and a plant cage!

It’s also a good idea to keep things small for your first few years. Many beginners overestimate how many plants they need, and not only will this make your garden time-consuming to care for, but you’ll probably end up with more produce than you know what to do with. In particular, vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants have a short shelf life, so if you grow too many, you’ll be forced to give them away quickly or end up tossing them in the compost. How many plants do you need? For a family of four, Garden Gate recommends four zucchini plants, four to six tomato plants, and three squash plants.

3. Use raised beds

If possible, you should plant your garden in raised beds. Why? You’ll be able to fit more plants, since you don’t need rows, and you can also fill the beds with rich, organic soil that will help your plants thrive. Plus, when your plants are closer together, there’s less room for weeds, which means less work for you.

4. Grow vertically to save space

If you’re pressed for space, you can fit more plants into your garden by encouraging them to grow up, not out. Most vining crops, such as tomatoes, beans, peas, squash, and cucumbers, will happily grow up trellises or cages, allowing you to maximize your planting area.

5. Give plants space

Raised beds allow you to plant closer together, but your vegetables still need space to grow — otherwise, they’ll end up competing for water, nutrients, and sunlight. Most vegetable and herb seeds come with spacing guidelines on the packet, so take these into account as you plan your garden. Also, be sure not to plant tall crops where they might block the sunlight for shorter plants.

6. Keep weeds and pests under control

Weeds aren’t just unsightly to look at. They can hinder the growth of your precious vegetables, which is why weeding is an essential task for any gardener. A set of high-quality garden tools will help you keep them at bay — take caution with weed killer or pesticides in your vegetable garden, or else you might contaminate your produce.

Debris such as fallen leaves can also be harmful to your plants, as it can spread diseases. For this reason, you’ll want to remove anything that’s covering the ground around your plants, especially during the fall.

Of course, there’s also the issue of bugs that can invade your garden, hindering the growth of your precious plants. There are some vegetable-safe insecticides you can use in vegetable gardens to control common pests like aphids and whiteflies, but you’ll want to use these products sparingly and be sure to wash produce thoroughly. On the other hand, if birds, deer, and other woodland critters have decided your garden is a good place to snack, garden netting is an inexpensive way to keep your plants safe.

7. Be careful when watering

Most people who claim to have a “brown (or black) thumb” simply haven’t figured out how much to water their plants. If you water them too much, the roots may rot, but if you don’t water them enough, they’ll wilt and die.

To remedy your plant-killing ways, stop guessing at when plants need water. The Old Farmer’s Almanac explains you’ll want to feel the soil before you water — if it sticks to your hand and holds together when pressed into a ball, it’s still moist enough and doesn’t need more water.

In general, you’ll also want to water earlier in the day so excess moisture has time to evaporate off leaves. Further, if you invest in equipment to help water your garden, a soaker hose is generally preferable to a sprinkler, as these deliver water closer to the root of the plant.

8. Create an indoor garden, instead

If a full-size garden isn’t going to work in your yard, you can always create an abridged indoor garden instead. For instance, there are lots of herb kits that you can easily grow in a windowsill, and they’ll provide you with fresh garnishes for all of your meals.

There are also a number of cool indoor gardening systems that are ideal for anyone who lacks outdoor space. AeroGarden and Click and Grow both offer countertop hydroponic systems that automatically regulate water and light using built-in LED grow lights, and you can use them to sprout herbs, small vegetable plants, and even flowers. Plus, these systems can often connect to your smartphone, providing gentle reminders when you need to add plant food or otherwise tend to your sprouts.

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by Food52 editors and writers. As an Amazon Associate and Skimlinks affiliate, Food52 earns a commission on qualifying purchases of the products they link to.

How to stay warm when you don’t have electricity

At the time of this writing, nearly 5 million Americans are without power from North Dakota to Texas, as a massive winter storm blankets the nation. In some parts of the country, power companies are implementing rolling blackouts for a second day in a row to limit demand. At least 20 deaths have been connected to Winter Storm Uri, according to The New York Times, and countless others are in danger as people struggle to stay warm. Even in other states like Oregon unaffected by Uri, there is a massive blackout due to ice storms, and over 200,000 without power in that area.

Modern humans have become largely dependent on electricity for most of the trappings of day-to-day life. And while losing electrical power can certainly limit work and activities, power loss is doubly scary in the winter, given that most heating appliances are dependent on electricity to function. 

Fortunately, if you or someone you love finds yourself without power during the winter, there are measures one can take to warm up without electricity, or with limited electricity. 

For those who live in an area that is partially electrified or suffering only brownouts, experts say conserving power wisely is key. Tim Burke, president and chief executive officer of the Omaha Public Power District, suggested that his 300,000 customers lower their thermostats by a few degrees, turn off lights that they are not using, unplug devices that are not being used or need to be charged and postpone non-essential household chores like dishwashing and laundry.

If you are entirely without power, or suspect that you will be soon, your priorities should be to trap as much heat as you can — both in your residence, and in terms of your body itself.

For your residence, this means try to stay in one room with yourself and the other people who live in your house or apartment (and pets). Once there, close off that area from other rooms to avoid losing heat in the room where you currently are.

In addition, you should stuff rags, towels or other insulating materials into any cracks in interior doors, particularly those that are adjacent to the outside. If you have a generator, use it, but make sure to keep it no less than 20 feet away from your home to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning.

But that’s not all that you can do. In order to keep heat in your place of residence, make sure to close all curtains and blinds (as well as windows, of course) at night. This helps insulate further and keep heat in. If you have a fireplace, candles or indoor-safe heater, use that to generate heat as well, but be careful: The last thing you want to do is start a fire that will put you and your loved ones in danger. The goal should be to trap as much heat as possible in the room that you and the people with whom you reside designate as the safest place for you to be, and to do so safely.

In addition to securing your location, you also need to secure your actual body. Wear multiple layers of clothing a hat, gloves, at least three layers of tops, at least two layers of bottoms and an outer layer to block out wind. The face masks that we all have been wearing during the pandemic actually trap heat on one’s face, too, and can help keep you warm. 

When sitting or sleeping, use as many extra blankets, winter coats and sleeping bags as you can. Make sure that, while doing this, you are not near anything that could set them alight; once again, you do not want to start a fire.

Finally, it is important to regularly eat and drink, since these activities keep your body warm. However, avoid caffeine and alcohol, as those substances actually make it harder for your body to retain heat. (Alcohol gives you the illusion of warmth by moving heat from your core to your extremities, but actually can exacerbate hypothermia.) You need to do a thorough inventory of your essentials and make sure to conserve them carefully. Only open your refrigerator and/or cooler when absolutely necessary and close it fully when you are done using it. Keep coolers packed with ice. Count to make sure that you have enough food and water to last for at least three to seven days. Also make sure you’ll have non-edible necessities like flashlights, batteries, a battery-powered radio and any necessary medicine and first-aid supplies.

Right now the safest thing for you to do is remain home if you are capable of doing so while staying warm. Traveling can be dangerous during a snowstorm. If your home is too cold for you to feel safe, however, drive carefully to a shelter where you know it will be warm, but make sure to socially distance and wear a mask while you’re there.

Finally, make sure you go to the hospital if you or someone you live with exhibits signs of hypothermia. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), adults begin to exhibit hypothermia through symptoms such as shivering, drowsiness, slurred speech, memory loss, fumbling hands, confusion and exhaustion. Babies will exhibit symptoms such as a loss of energy or bright red and cold skin.

The significance of the Bidens’ conspicuous holiday cheer, especially for the Lunar New Year

This weekend, there were three holidays crammed on the calendar back-to-back — the Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day — and their observance by the first family served as yet another opportunity for the Bidens to distinguish themselves and their collective values from the Trumps, likely to the particular displeasure of Melania. 

It began early on Feb. 12 when, as the Associated Press reported, White House employees unveiled Jill Biden’s Valentine’s decorations on the North Lawn. 

“I just wanted some joy,” the first lady told reporters during a surprise visit to the lawn with President Joe Biden and their two German shepherds, Champ and Major. “I think things have been so — with the pandemic — everybody’s feeling a little down, so it’s just a little joy, a little hope, that’s all.”

The lawn decorations included oversized pink, red and white hearts, emblazoned with words like “Kindness,” “Healing” and “Compassion.” One of the hearts was signed, “Love, Jill.”

This was just hours after CNN’s Kate Bennett published her feature, “Melania Trump disengaged from her husband’s second impeachment trial and bitter over Jill Biden’s publicity.” The piece discussed Melania’s routine since leaving the White House for Florida on the morning of Biden’s inauguration. She’s living at Mar-a-Lago, going to the spa twice daily and, per Bennett, nursing a fair amount of resentment toward the attention Jill Biden has already received as the first lady. 

The two women’s styles for engaging with the American public through their roles as first lady are already markedly different. Jill has already been featured on the cover of several national publications and held at least seven events or speaking engagements since becoming first lady; meanwhile, during her tenure as first lady, Melania never did an interview with a national publication. 

While Jill decks the White House lawn with heart-shaped decorations encouraging hope, Melania made waves when her former friend and senior advisor released audio from 2018 in which she stated, “I’m working my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f**k about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”

This came after, as Tabitha Blankenbiller wrote for Salon, Melania’s 2017 Christmas display, which was so grim and barren that it launched a thousand memes. “In a dress as white as her dead tree branches she wandered through a cursed forest throwing clawing, ominous shadows up the walls,” Blankenbiller wrote. “The theme, ‘Time-Honored Tradition,’ was as contemptuous as her ‘I Really Don’t Care, Do U’ Zara coat.” 

The difference in warmth is immediately perceptible, which underscores the ways in which the first ladies publicly engage — or don’t — with their husbands’ messaging. 

“When Trump left Washington, she had the worst favorability ratings of any modern first lady upon departure from the White House, according to polling conducted by SSRS for CNN,” wrote Bennett. “At one time, early in her tenure, that wasn’t the case – Melania Trump was the most-liked member of the Trump family and the broader administration. But it’s possible that Donald Trump’s incendiary style, even though not necessarily something his wife condoned, had the residual effect of chipping away at the first lady’s popularity.” 

Melania never publicly condemned the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol, nor did she — despite being an immigrant — ever denounce her husband’s consistently xenophobic rhetoric, which in the past year manifested in his calling the novel coronavirus the “China Virus.” So much for “Be Best.” 

Contrast this with the Bidens’ Lunar New Year message on Feb. 12.

“Amid the pain of pandemic, the loss of lives and livelihoods, we’ve seen another tragedy,” President Biden said. “Racism, harassment and hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It’s simply wrong — it’s a stain on our national character. Every person, no matter their race, background, religion, or language they speak deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.” 

Jill Biden continued, saying that the Year of the Ox should serve as a reminder of the persistence and resilience of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The Bidens used their holiday message both as an opportunity to condemn racist violence, as well as to portray a unified front. 

This is pretty standard for first families, something that could have easily been forgotten during the Trump presidency amid the #FreeMelania furor and speculation driven by Mary Trump’s book about whether the Trumps actually even like each other. As The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi speculated in 2020, “It seems that no one hates the Trumps as much as they hate each other.” 

That kind of strife underlying the country’s head office is unsettling, and was mirrored in Trump’s public life; his — and Melania’s — administration was one of callousness and coldness. That’s why it means something to see the Bidens appear as a unified team, and why the normalcy of watching them, for instance, spend President’s Day weekend together playing Mario Kart with their granddaughters ushers in a sense of sharp relief. 

In his Presidents’ Day speech, Biden said of managing the novel coronavirus, “If we do it together as one nation, one people, one America, we will not fail. America never has.” 

Much of what the first family does is for optics, of course, but in the case of the Bidens, it’s easier to buy into the president’s calls for togetherness and hope because of how he and Jill continue to engage with each other and the American people, much like they did this holiday weekend. 

How one tiny country is beating the pandemic and climate change

The small Himalayan country of Bhutan, mainly known for measuring national happiness instead of GDP, is the only carbon-negative country on the planet. Believe it or not, it has only had one single death from COVID-19. Is that a coincidence?

Madeline Drexler’s new article in the Atlantic, “The Unlikeliest Pandemic Success Story,” dives into the reasons that Bhutan has managed to fare so well against the novel coronavirus while rich countries and middle-income have struggled to keep it in check. The tiny developing country, landlocked between India and Tibet, wasn’t exactly set up for success. It began 2020 with exactly one PCR machine to test for the virus, according to Drexler’s reporting, and one doctor with advanced training in critical care.

For anyone who’s thought a lot about the collective action problem posed by climate change, Bhutan’s recipe for success may sound familiar. Responding to a crisis isn’t just about the great technology you have, but how fast you act, how you support your neighbors, and how willing you are to sacrifice for the common good.

It helps explain why Bhutan is the world’s only “carbon-negative” country. That means it takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it emits, which, if more countries joined in, could actually reverse global warming. Bhutan’s rich natural features make that possible. Its constitution mandates that 60 percent of its total land is covered in forests. An extensive system of rivers provides abundant hydroelectricity, much of which Bhutan exports to India. At the international Paris climate summit in 2015, Bhutan was said to have the most ambitious pledge in the world — it was already absorbing three times more carbon dioxide than it emitted.

Granted, with a population of 760,000 and an average income of $3,400 per person, Bhutan’s example can only go so far. Still, its response to the dual crises of coronavirus and climate change is inspiring.

At the first hint of alarm, Bhutan acted quickly and firmly. Bhutan confirmed its first case of COVID-19 in March — an American tourist. Within 6 hours and 18 minutes, some 300 people had been contract-traced and quarantined, Drexler writes. Communication was clear: Face masks were called for from the start. The country went into full lockdown to suppress the virus whenever it found risk of community transmission, first in August, then in December. It’s reminiscent of how proactive Bhutan has been on climate change.

Its leadership was competent — and trusted. Bhutan’s king didn’t spend months denying the dangers of the virus or years denying the reality of global heating. Instead, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck said that even one death from COVID-19 was one too many. He was engaged in detailed pandemic plans and visited frontline workers to encourage them. Other leaders stood up, too: The members of Bhutan’s Parliament donated a month’s salary to the response effort. “I don’t think any other country can say that leaders and ordinary people enjoy such mutual trust,” one journalist in Bhutan told the Atlantic.

The government provided resources so people could do the right thing. Personal sacrifice, whether it’s quarantining or cutting your carbon footprint, doesn’t work well if you’re set up to fail. When Bhutan issued a mandatory quarantine in March for anyone who might’ve been exposed to the virus, it provided free room and board in hotels. It also delivered food and care packages and offered counseling for those in quarantine. An ongoing relief fund launched by the king has given $19 million to some 34,000 Bhutanese struggling to make ends meet.

Altruism and sacrifice are baked in. “Resilience” isn’t just a buzzword in Bhutan, which is three-quarters Buddhist, but a guiding principle rooted in bearing hardship, Drexler writes. Bhutanese doctors and government officials who might have been exposed to COVID-19 slept alone, away from their families. Farmers donated crops and locals brought hot milk tea and food to the Ministry of Health in the middle of the night.

In hard times, cooperation is key to success. “People say the COVID disaster in America has been about a denial of science,” Asaf Bitton, the executive director of the Boston-based health center Ariadne Labs, told the Atlantic. “But what we couldn’t agree on is the social compact we would need to make painful choices together in unity, for the collective good.”

“Republicans brought this on themselves”: Whoopi Goldberg shuts down Meghan McCain on GOP extremism

On Tuesday’s episode of ABC’s “The View,” co-host Meghan McCain objected to the reaction following Donald Trump’s second impeachment acquittal, leaving co-host Whoopi Goldberg so dismayed that she schooled McCain about the roots of radicalism in the Republican Party.

McCain argued that if Republicans are the party of “QAnon” then Democrats are the party of “socialism and late-term abortion.” 

“I believe that abortion is murder, I believe that life begins at conception,” she said, clunkily inserting abortion into the conversation. McCain said that, according to the media, the only way to become a good Republican is to become a Democrat. “I don’t know what to do anymore, because I can’t keep coming on TV everyday saying that we’re all Nazis and you know, Hitler salutes and whatever. It’s just not intellectually honest.”

McCain highlighted that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is still around 80%, implying that the Republican Party is simply increasingly conservative. 

Goldberg couldn’t let McCain’s declarations go unanswered, however.

“You should be a little uncomfortable,” she started. “You’re thought of this way because of what you’ve shown everybody.”

Goldberg passionately insisted that the Republican Party has brought this on themselves, alluding to the fact that Trump emboldened white supremacists and racist behavior for the last five years.    

“Let’s talk a little bit about women and having babies,” she added. “Everyone has the right to make the decision they have to make for their life, okay? The bottom line is, whatever you decide to do as a woman with your body, that should be between you and your doctor. And sometimes poor women may need help.”

“The Republicans, you showed your faces, you said you were okay with everything that happened, all the things that we’ve been taught as Americans that are not okay. You said it’s ok and you’ve opened up the door for people to continue to act poorly.”